CIA's Man 'Wins' Iraqi General Election

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows, that the Iraq war is largely about oil" - Alan Greenspan former head of the Federal Reserve

Tin-pot Iraqi dictator-in-waiting, Ayad Allawi was the US-appointed 'interim-Iraqi Prime Minister' for 9 months in 2004-5. Today he defeated incumbent Nouri al-Maliki to the position of Prime Minister by 10,000 votes according to reports.

Now there's one more CIA stooge ruling over yet another formerly sovereign nation and people.

Under CIA direction he ran an exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord, in the early 1990s that sent agents into Baghdad to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities in an effort to depose Saddam Hussein. Their targets included a mosque, a movie house and a newspaper -- the latter strike killing a child passing by. Ex-CIA operatives said a bus full of schoolchildren was also blown apart.

As interim Iraqi Prime minister in 2004-5, Allawi was responsible for operating death squads out of the Iraqi interior ministry in an effort to divide Iraqi society and create the appearance of 'civil war' between Iraq's Sunni and Shia populations and thereby divide and conquer the Iraqi resistance to US occupation lead by Moqtada al Sadr.

On Thursday 14 October 2004, Allawi stated: "[w]e have asked Fallujah residents to turn over al-Zarqawi and his group. If they don't do it, we are ready for major operations in Fallujah". Fallujah, a city of 300,000 people was then mercilessly bombed. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians were killed, many of them horribly burned with illegal white phosphorus shells.

In 2004 it was reported that Allawi personally executed six bound 'insurgents' - ordinary Iraqis fighting US occupation.

On at least one occasion in 2004 Allawi personally intervened to prevent a ceasefire and peace talks with the Iraqi resistance because he realised that any just peace settlement in Iraq would, by popular mandate, not include either him or his CIA masters in a controlling position.

In 2005 arrests were issued for Allawi and 27 of his former 'ministers' in the interim government over the alleged disappearance or misappropriation of $1 billion in military procurement funds.

With Allawi as Prime Minister, Iraq will be more secure as the latest trophy in the American Empire's cabinet, as will the the illegal contracts originally signed by Paul Bremer in 2004 to give all of Iraq's resources to American companies.

Would The Real War Criminals Please Stand Up

Diamonds are a spooks best friend

Charles Taylor, Liberian President for 6 years until 2003, is currently on trial for international war crimes at a U.N.-backed special court in the Hague. Those that facilitated his crimes will not be there.

Taylor seized the presidency in 1998 after an appalling eight-year campaign of terror. Taylor is accused of orchestrating rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers during the 1991-2002 civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Some of the harrowing testimony has been provided by Alex Tamba Teh. Teh claims that he saw a rebel commander from Liberia called "Rocky" shoot 101 people:

"After he killed the civilians... he gave the instruction that they should be decapitated. Rocky gave the order to the small boy units"

Tamba Teh recounted how child soldiers rounded on one child and chopped off his hand, then his arm, then both his feet, before tossing him into a toilet pit. In all somewhere between 75,000 and 200,000 Sierra Leoneans were killed (estimates vary) with many more suffering mutilations and around 2 million left homeless.

[Today Sierra Leon's shy teenagers] show you their scars and explain that RUF rebel commanders cut them and rubbed cocaine into the wound to make them mad enough to fight or to chop people's limbs off. Sometimes the victims were their neighbours, or their brothers and sisters.

"They gave us drugs the whole time," says Saidu, 16, who was abducted and recruited into the RUF when he was five. First, he worked as a bearer and messenger for the soldiers' "wives", most of whom were themselves abducted adolescent girls. When he was seven he was given a gun, a couple of months' training in Liberia, and sent to fight.

"It was fun, like a big boy's game," he says. "They made us so crazy, we enjoyed the smoking, the drinking, the shooting, all that." He didn't enjoy having to cut a man's arm off, though, one morning on the road in from the airport. They were all lined up at gunpoint, the men, shaking, their arms obediently held out. Saidu couldn't look when it was his turn to swing his machete. He doesn't think the man survived. "I can't forget his scream," he says.

The civil war in Sierra Leon was fought over control of the lucrative diamond mining trade with the neighboring nations of Guinea and Liberia deeply involved. In 1991 a small band of men calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) under the leadership of a former-corporal, Foday Sankoh, began to attack villages in eastern Sierra Leone on the Liberian border. The RUF's signature terror tactic was physical mutilation. An estimated 20,000 civilians suffered amputation, with machetes and axes being used to sever arms, legs, lips, and ears. Over the course of the next 12 years a series of coups and counter-coups followed with the British, who ruled Sierra Leon as a colony until 1961, choosing to do little but observe the bloodshed, until the UN chose to enforce a relative peace in 2003 which still holds.

Foday Sankoah created the RFU with substantial support from Liberian leader Taylor who remained one of the primary antagonists throughout the conflict. In that respect, the current proceedings against him are indeed justified, but the evidence that will be undoubtedly missing from his trial concerns the claims of former Washington Post West African Bureau chief Douglas Farah. In 2004 Farah published Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror detailing the ties between "al-Qaeda" and diamond networks in West Africa. Farah is also a senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center, a "right-wing think tank for military strategy with a history of working with hard-line, anti-Soviet groups promoting an aggressive U. S. foreign policy", according to Group Watch.

In 2004 the news web site AllAfrica.com conducted an interview with Farah on the 9-11 Commission findings, the interaction between "al-Qaeda" and West Africa's diamond trade, and his view of the role U.S. intelligence has played. Excerpts from the Allafrica article and interview follow with my emphasis:

West Africa: Debate Over al Qaeda's Connection to West Africa's Diamond Trade Takes New Turns

August 5, 2004
AllAfrica.com

Washington Post correspondent Douglas Farah, in a recently published 225-page book entitled "Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror," provides a detailed description of al Qaeda's activity in West Africa.

According to Farah, American intelligence agencies "overlooked" the connection between diamond trading and al Qaeda and the central role played in harboring and profiting from the illicit dealing by Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was forced into exile in Nigeria last year under a deal brokered by the U.S. government.

Farah's findings have been hotly disputed by the CIA and FBI, and their viewpoint was reflected in the recently release report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission. "We have seen no persuasive evidence that al Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds," the report states (page 171).

But a confidential investigation by the Sierra Leone Special Court further bolsters the view that that the alliance between Taylor and al Qaeda was substantial, according to an article in Wednesday's Boston Globe by Washington correspondent Bryan Bender.

"Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents," Bender wrote.

Citing the Special Court's investigation and U.S. intelligence official, Bender said a planned raid a few weeks after September 11, 2001 by U.S. Special Forces aimed at capturing Ghailani and an associate in Liberia was called off for unexplained reasons. One explanation raised by Bender's sources was Taylor's reported longstanding relations with the CIA.

In 2002 the Washington Post reported that European intelligence agencies had found evidence that Taylor hosted "senior terrorist operatives" who oversaw a $20 million diamond-buying spree that effectively cornered the market on the region's precious stones, receiving a $1 million payment for his help. Senior European intelligence sources were however "baffled" by the lack of U.S. interest from the CIA in these findings.

AllAfrica: What is your reaction to the single sentence in the 9-11 Commission report that dismisses African diamonds as a source of al Qaeda funding?

Farah: If you look at the footnotes of that particular citation, it's all FBI and CIA reports with the exception of an interview they quote with Allan White from the Special Court in Sierra Leone. I find it disturbing because they had access to the Belgium police report, which I have on my website, which they were given. The Special Court also wrote a special brief to them and the intelligence indicating al Qaeda's presence. The book, the Global Witness Report - none of those are cited as having been used at all in making their determination.

I think the 9-11 Commission was under a great deal of pressure to make hurried judgments. In my limited communication with them, they told me that they could not get to the bottom of the dispute. If you read my book, I have a lot of discussion of why the CIA tried to discredit the story, and the great lengths that they went to do so, despite the fact that they did not succeed, and the fact that more evidence continues to emerge [that] the story is actually correct. But there is a great hostility towards the story from the intelligence community, and all the commission did was take the intelligence community reports and use them as their basis for making their assertions.

AllAfrica: The 9-11 Commission also stated "to date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9-11 attacks?" How do you respond to that?

Farah: The proof of the telephone contacts to Afghanistan on September 10th and the prior communications from the Belgium police who traced the phone call from the satellite phone used by Aziz Nassour and Samih Osailly [two al Qaeda operatives whose activities in west Africa are detailed in Farah's book] is not hearsay evidence. They made numerous calls and it's documented. I have the phone bills for them, and more importantly, the police got them out of the official records. I do not think it's something you can easily dismiss. Neither are the bank records from Artesia Bank that show $20m flowing and being unaccounted for, and all the other indications that other people came up with. [...]

AllAfrica: Alex Yearsley of Global Witness asserts that, "Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001." You write about dealings between the CIA and Ibrahim Bah, the Senegalese mastermind who coordinated the diamond trade with al Qaeda. Why would the CIA form this kind of partnership?

Farah: It's a disturbing question. I do not have direct knowledge myself of the CIA dealings with Taylor. Taylor has told others and me that he has worked for the CIA over time.

AllAfrica: You write that the diamond trade in Africa transcends ideological and religious differences. Could you please talk more about the business dealings between Israeli and Lebanese merchants in West Africa?

Farah: [...] I think it's one of the truly extraordinary demonstrations of the depth to which people will sink in their greed for diamonds. It's the epitomy of the worst kind of greed and corruption of moral principles. They come with the desire to make money at any cost. What both the Arabs and Israelis told me was, 'Business is business. Here we do business. Back there is war and back there is not our problem.' If you look at Lebanese with ties to radical Islamists trying to buy weapons with Israelis to ship [elsewhere], it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand, and very hard to believe unless you see it and talk to people yourself.

As Farah states, all of it is certainly very disturbing, and his comment that "it's a web that is very complicated, very difficult to understand" is indeed true but the web is made infinitely more complex and becomes impossible to understand when, as appears to be the case with Farah, the conclusions that the data points to conflict with the lies fed to us by our governments and the mainstream media. Lies like the one that says that the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies are fighting a "war against terror" when the reality is that they are waging a war of terror on the entire planet.

Lies like the one that says "al-Qaeda" is an Islamic terror group when in fact it is just a name given by Western governments to a fictitious group that is used to take the blame for terrorist attacks carried out by Western intelligence agencies (Mossad, CIA, MI5).

Lies like the claim that the US, Israeli and British governments and their agencies are doing everything they can to stamp out "Islamic terrorism" when in truth they have for many years been actively creating a false reality of "Islamic terrorism" which they use as a cover for their own illegal and murderous activities around the world.

Charles Taylor is currently being tried in the Hague for war crimes in Sierra Leon that were financed in part by the diamond trade. It is something of an irony that not 40 miles to the south of the Hague sits the Belgian city of Antwerp where 90 percent of the world's diamonds are cut and polished by the city's large Hasidic Jewish community. Surely the court in the Hague could find a few answers to the real source of the Sierra Leon tragedy there?

But I digress, in fact I have been digressing since the second paragraph. What I really wanted to say as regards Charles Taylor's ongoing trial for war crimes is that I have a question that I need someone to answer, and it is a very pressing question indeed:

Charles Taylor is being tried by an international war crimes tribunal because he is responsible for sending an army into another nation in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. If the moral standards by which Taylor is being measured are just and fair, why then are George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and a host of other Neocons and Israel-firsters (both in the US and in Israel) not waiting in line behind him?

The Bush government, at the behest of their Israeli friends and with the complicity of their British lackeys, also sent an army into another country in the pursuit of personal gain and in doing so caused the deaths of not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

The following is but a tiny fraction of the massive evidence for US government war crimes in Iraq:

'I saw the heads of my two little girls come off'

April 2 2003
Smh.com.au

An Iraqi mother in a van fired on by US soldiers says she saw her two young daughters decapitated in the incident that also killed her son and eight other members of her family.

The children's father, who was also in the van, said US soldiers fired on them as they fled towards a checkpoint because they thought a leaflet dropped by US helicopters told them to "be safe", and they believed that meant getting out of their village to Karbala.

Bakhat Hassan - who lost his daughters, aged two and five, his three-year-old son, his parents, two older brothers, their wives and two nieces aged 12 and 15, in the incident - said US soldiers at an earlier checkpoint had waved them through.

As they approached another checkpoint 40km south of Karbala, they waved again at the American soldiers.

"We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe," Hassan said through an Army translator at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital set up at a vast Army support camp near Najaf.

The soldiers didn't wave back. They fired.

"I saw the heads of my two little girls come off," Hassan's heavily pregnant wife, Lamea, 36, said numbly.

She repeated herself in a flat, even voice: "My girls - I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead."

US officials originally gave the death toll from the incident as seven, but reporters at the scene placed it at 10. And Bakhat Hassan terrible toll was 11 members of his family.

'US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one'

Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise

Rory McCarthy in Ramadi
Friday May 21, 2004
The Guardian

The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

"The bombing started at 3 am," she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. "We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one," she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.

She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. "I left them because they were dead," she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.

"I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn't kill me."

U.S. soldier poured kerosene on raped, slain Iraqi

One of the U.S. soldiers accused of raping and killing a 14 year-old Iraqi girl and slaying her family told investigators that after the killings he poured kerosene on the girl's bullet-ridden body.

In an interview with the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigative Division in June, Spec. James P. Barker, 23, said that he held the girl down while she was raped by another soldier, Sgt. Paul Cortez, during an incident in March in Mahmoudiya, according to testimony from CID Special Agent Benjamin Bierce.

Barker said that he then attempted to rape the girl himself, before she was shot to death by former Pfc. Steven D. Green, Bierce said.

For the last five years the US government and military have waged a war on the Iraqi people that dwarfs the Sierra Leon conflict in terms of its mindless brutality. The people of Sierra Leon, while traumatised for years to come, are at least enjoying relative peace - the people of Iraq continue to suffer bombings, mutilations and the predations of US soldiers on an almost daily basis. Can we therefore expect the American, Israeli and British war criminals to appear in the dock in the Hague any time soon? If not, why not?

There is something VERY wrong with this world.

Benazir Bhutto - A Warning To Us All

Benazir Bhutto - Murdered by the Pathocrats

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was murdered Thursday December 27th, 2007 in Rawalpindi, a city near Pakistan's capital Islamabad. Having survived an attempted assassination in October, today under the cover of a "suicide bombing" Ms. Bhutto was shot in the neck and head from close range.

Coincidentally (or not) almost 29 years ago her father, Zulfikar Bhutto, also a former PM of Pakistan, was hung in the very same city by then Pakistan dictator General Zia Ul-Haq. In 2003, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was arrested in Rawalpindi. The evidence for Khalid's involvement came largely from the now destroyed CIA torture tapes. Small world. It should come as no surprise therefore that, while separated by decades, the untimely deaths of Ms. Bhutto and her father are, in the context of the American-led war on terror, inextricably linked. Suffice to say, the fingerprints of the Pathocrats are everywhere.

The Arrogant Empire

To fully understand the forces that have shaped our modern world and brought it to the socio-political precipice upon which it now sits, we cannot speak of "America" or even "the US government" in terms of a single isolated nation and group of political leaders. America today is a long and well-established empire whose seat of power extends far beyond Washington D.C. With military bases in at least 121 of 187 world countries and an economic footprint that is global in scope, "America" today is a world-wide phenomenon rather than a single Western nation.

Zulfikar Bhutto

Like dozens of similar cases around the world over the past 100 years, the ousting in 1977, and murder 18 months later, of the democratically elected Zulfikar Bhutto could not have happened without the support of the then US government and CIA. Former US attorney general and outspoken critic of US foreign policy Ramsey Clark was directly involved in attempting to have Zulfikar Bhutto's sentence commuted, although he was ultimately prevented from representing him at trial by General Zia. Clark has pointed directly at CIA involvement:

"the similarities in the staging of riots in Chile (where the CIA helped overthrow President Salvador Allende in 1973) and in Pakistan [in 1977] are just too close."

GeoStrategy

Up until 1989 and the "fall" of Soviet Russia, Pakistan sat on Russia's southern border and represented Russia's only access to the warm trading waters of the Persian Gulf. From a strategic point of view and in the context of the "cold war", it made perfect sense for the empire to attempt to expand its global influence and at the same time deal a significant economic blow to the Russians. Both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan were therefore firmly in the empire's sights.

The empire's problem with Zulfikar Bhutto was an ideological one. He, like all truly humane political leaders was not inclined to allow the Pakistani people to become fodder for the relentless march of the American empire. In a speech in October 1966 Bhutto proclaimed: "Islam is our faith, democracy is our policy, socialism is our economy. All power to the people."

In terms of the empire's designs on South Asia, (which included the longer term goal of setting up a future phony "clash of civilisations" between Islam and the "Christian West") Bhutto could not be allowed to establish a largely secular, socialist Pakistan and simply had to go. Indeed, over the past 60 years, no quarter has been given to any leader of a Muslim nation who was not either naturally fascistically-inclined or prepared to bow down before the empire.

"Islamicization"

General Zia then was given the necessary support and assurances by the representatives of the US empire in order to feel confident to force Bhutto from office and later hang him on trumped-up charges of corruption. He then went about establishing strict Islamic law and a brutal penal code. Zia changed the punishment for damage against property from a fine or imprisonment (or both) to the amputation of the right hand of the offender. For robbery, the right hand and left foot of the offender was the price. For adultery the new punishment was flogging (100 lashes) for both men and women, if unmarried and, if married, the culprit was stoned to death. Zia also promoted military officers on the basis of religious devotion. The Koran and other religious material becomes compulsory reading material in army training courses and according to journalist Kathy Gannon "Radical Islamist ideology began to permeate the military and the influence of the most extreme groups crept into the army." The BBC also acknowledged that Zia's self-declared "Islamization" policies created a "culture of jihad" within Pakistan that continues until present day. And all of it rubber-stamped by the "greatest democracy on earth".

General Zia

General Zia also created tens of thousands of madrassas, or religious boarding schools, the very same madrasses referred to by Donald Rumsfeld when he said:

"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Soon thereafter, (1979-80) large quantities of American dollars began flowing into the good general's coffers, and Zia was clearly well aware of his commanding position. What price would the empire pay for his geo-strategically positioned nation? When offered a $400 million "aid" package by US President Jimmy Carter, Zia sneered and said "peanuts". (Carter used to be a peanut farmer).

Overthrowing Democracy

In the end, the empire funneled $billions to Zia, on the proviso that he used most of it to fund a bunch of fuedal warlords known as the Taleban over the border in Afghanistan. Afghanistan you see, had recently taken a turn for the worse in much the same way that Pakistan had under Bhutto. In 1973 Dr. Mohammad Daoud had declared a new Republic of Afghanistan, ousting the monarch government of Mohammed Zaher Shah in a bloodless coup d'etat. Daoud was an extreme conservative and ruled as absolute dictator. In response to the oppressive policy of the new regime the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, PDPA, was formed, but in 1978 Daoud's ordered the arrest of almost the entire leadership of the PDPA.

The progressive masses in Kabul saw the arrests as an attempt to annihilate the PDPA, just as the military junta had done to the workers' parties in Chile in 1973 (with US backing). An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the popular party leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki. Within a day, Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government proclaimed, headed by Taraki.

According to the CIA's own casebook in Afghanistan:

Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural landowners owned more than 45 percent of the arable land. A third of the rural people were landless laborers, sharecroppers or tenants.

Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular feature of rural life". An indebted farmer turned over half his crop each year to the money lender.

"When the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both landownership inequalities and usury." Decree number six of the revolution canceled mortgage debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners.

The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs, especially for women. It printed textbooks in many languages-Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. "The government trained many more teachers, built additional schools and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans", says the country study.

Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3 percent in Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5 percent.

By 1985 there had been an 80-percent increase in hospital beds. The government initiated mobile medical units and brigades of women and young people to go to the undeveloped countryside and provide medical services to the peasants for the first time.

Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime were to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice in marriage. "Historically, gender roles and women's status have been tied to property relations. Women and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of property and to belong to a male."

Before the revolution, a bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the wedding night could be murdered by her father and/or brothers.

After the revolution, young women in the cities, where the new government's authority was strong, could tear off the veil, freely go out in public, attend school and get a job. They were organized in the Democratic Women's Organization of Afghanistan, founded in 1965 by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada.

The revolution and the establishment of the social government under Taraki challenged the old fundamentalist Islamic order. Afghanistan was slowly being turned into a progressive and libertarian country with a somewhat secular government providing equal rights for all.

So, like I said, Afghanistan had taken a 'turn for the worse' from the point of view of the empire, and was now being led by a socialist, secular (read 'Communist') government. Something had to be done. So, the CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting feudal Afghan warlords and their servants for a "holy war" against the "communists", who had liberated "their" women and "their" peasants.

Baiting The "Commies"

But the empire has always been eager to maximise its gains, and along with correcting the growing political 'aberration' in Afghanistan, there was the chance to 'stick it' to the Commies.

Zbigniew Brzezinski served as US National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. In an interview in "Le Nouvel Observateur" Jan 15-21, 1998, p.76, he tells us:

Brzezinski: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

The "pro-Soviet regime" mentioned here was the socialist government of Tariki that was advocating women's rights and education for all.

Question: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to
intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

The fact is that the Russians were enticed to intervene in Afghanistan because of the aforementioned aid and weaponry that the US was supplying to the Feudal warlords who were seeking to overthrow the socialist government of Taraki - the one that had begun to reform and open up Afghan society.

Question: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, in substance: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Question: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

So, there you have it. The American empire is currently engaged in an unending "war on terror" with "some stirred up Moslems" as the opposition, which the empire themselves "stirred up".

Drugs For The World

But there were also the spoils of empire to be considered. With the help of President Zia, Afghanistan was deemed a country perfectly suited for the production of vast quantities of opium, the proceeds from which the empire would use to fuel its progress and at the same time flood certain population centers with narcotics and engage in a little "social engineering" (the black neigborhoods of America being a case in point).

CIA covert weapons shipments were sent by the Pakistani army and the ISI to rebel camps in the North West Frontier province near the Afghanistan border. The governor of the province, Lieutenant General Fazle Haq, who author Alfred McCoy calls Pakistani President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq's "closest confidant and the de facto overlord of the mujaheddin guerrillas" allowed hundreds of heroin refineries to set up in his province. Beginning around 1982, Pakistani army trucks carrying CIA weapons from Karachi (Pakistan) would arrive in Haq's province and return loaded with heroin, protected from police search by Pakistani intelligence (ISI) papers. By 1982, Haq was listed with Interpol as an international drug trafficker, not to mention a CIA asset. Despite his worsening reputation, visiting US politicians such as CIA Director William Casey and Vice President George H. W. Bush continued to meet with him when they visited Pakistan. Haq then moved his heroin money through the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). A highly placed US official later stated that Haq "was our man... everybody knew that Haq was also running the drug trade" and that "BCCI was completely involved".

Both European and Pakistani police complained that investigations of heroin trafficking in the province were "aborted at the highest level". In 1989, shortly after Benazir Bhutto took over as the new ruler of Pakistan, Pakistani police arrested Haq and charged him with murder. He was considered a multi-billionaire by this time was gunned down and killed in 1991 before he could be tried. Even President Zia was implicated in the drug trade. In 1985, a Norwegian government investigation led to the arrest of a Pakistani drug dealer who just happened to be President Zia's personal finance manager. When arrested, his briefcase contained Zia's personal banking records.

Echos Of 9/11

Washington spent billions of dollars every year in funding their proxy Russian war, with the son of a prestigious and wealthy Saudi family with close ties to the Saudi royals, Osama bin Laden, serving as the figurehead for the warlords (and Western public). During it all, the empire's man, General Zia was tasked with overseeing the disbursement of the money, weapons and the manufacturing of heroin. With the Soviets defeated, Afghanistan in the grip of the ultra-conservative Taleban war-lords and Pakistan economically and politically impoverished under US-backed military dictators, the American empire had provided itself with both a laboratory from which to stage-manage an "Islamic terror threat" and a theatre in which to wage war upon that threat.

Interestingly, Zia died in a mysterious plane crash in August 1988. Shortly after a smooth take-off, the control tower lost contact with the aircraft with witnesses reporting that it was flying erratically. The aircraft then nosedived before exploding on impact, killing General Zia and several other senior army generals, as well as American Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel and General Herbert Wassom, head of the American military attaché in Islamabad. For many reasons, not least of which is that there were many people who wanted Zia dead, it is highly unlikely that Zia's the crash was an accident. Several conspiracy theories have been proposed with the most interesting being that the Israeli Mossad brought down the plane. Barbara Crossette who was the New York Times bureau chief in South Asia from 1988 to 1991 interviewed the American ambassador to India in 1988, John Gunther Dean.

Dean alleges that Israel wanted to prevent Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons and urged the US congress to investigate the Israeli-Indian axis. As a reward for speaking his mind Dean was accused of mental imbalance and sent to Switzerland for 6 weeks to "rest" before being asked to resign. Most interesting of all however is the method used to bring down Zia's plane. Pakistan's official report on the crash found traces of chemicals in the wreckage of the plane, a lot of which was buried in the sandy earth or scattered around the site by the impact of the crash. Those chemicals, the Pakistanis said, were phosphorous, chlorine, potassium, antimony, and pentaaerythritol tetranitrate. Specifically, phosphorous was found on mango seeds and skins in the wreckage. Several crates of mangos had been loaded onto the plane before take off and that the fruit had been laced instead with a debilitating, possibly fatal gas. Khalid Hasan a Pakistani analyst writing in the independent Pakistani newspaper "Friday Times" in 2004, said that it was VX gas. Ambassador Dean claims that he was also told in New Delhi that there was VX gas on the plane. Those that have read our book 911: The Ultimate Truth will immediately understand why the suggestion that Israel was involved in using fatal gas to bring down passenger aircraft is particularly intriguing.

Benazir

At the tender age of 24 Benazir Bhutto found herself under house arrest in the wake of her father's imprisonment by General Zia in 1977. She was allowed to leave Pakistan for the UK in 1984 leading her father's Socialist Pakistan People's Party (PPP) in exile. She would later become the first and youngest female prime minister of Pakistan and of any Islamic nation when she led the government from 1988-1990 and again from 1993-1996. In both cases she was ousted by false charges fabricated by the same Punjab elites and powerful landlord families that had opposed her father and prevented both from implementing the reformist, secular policies so desired by the Pakistani people.

Throughout her career the young and glamorous Benazir successfully and accurately portrayed herself as a refreshing contrast to the overwhelmingly male-dominated political establishment. In 1998 Benazir went into self-imposed exile in Dubai where she remained until she returned to Pakistan on 18 October 2007 after reaching an understanding with CIA-asset President Musharraf who took power in a military coup in 1999. Under the terms of the agreement with Musharraf she was granted amnesty and all (trumped-up) corruption charges were withdrawn. Since the expulsion order on her was lifted, Benazir had been campaigning fiercely for the PPP and was widely expected to present a serious challenge to CIA-installed dictator Musharraf in the upcoming general elections.

While en route to a rally in Karachi on 18 October 2007, two explosions occurred shortly after Bhutto had landed and left Jinnah International Airport. She was not injured but the explosions, later alleged to be a suicide-bomb attack, killed 136 people and injured at least 450. Despite the obvious threat to her life from those who had most to gain from death, including but not limited to Pakistani dictator and CIA asset Musharraf, Benazir remained true to her belief that political leadership is defined by service to the ordinary people of this world. As such she insisted on continuing to travel to public rallies around the country. She stated recently:

"I decided not to be holed up in my home, a virtual prisoner," she wrote. "I went to my ancestral village of Larkana to pray at my father's grave. Everywhere, the people rallied around me in a frenzy of joy. I feel humbled by their love and trust."

But in a world such as ours, love and trust are increasingly assailed on all sides by a darkness that seeks to violently extinguish all noble ideals, and from one perspective we could say that Benazir's bravery was foolhardy. From another perspective however, it is possible that her sacrifice will ignite in millions of others a righteous anger that may yet thwart the darkness that threatens to engulf us all. There is one thing we can say for sure, and that is that Benazir faced the psychopathic threat to her own future and that of all humanity with open eyes. In the aftermath of the first attempt on her life in October she stated:

"Soon thereafter, I was asked by authorities not to travel in cars with tinted windows - which protected me from identification by terrorists - or travel with privately armed guards. I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing."

As the PPP party leader announced her death, the Pakistani knew instantly where to look for the culprits as they erupted into shouts of "Musharraf is a dog". Let's not forget who his masters are.

Benazir Bhutto, died a sacrificial lamb but also a stark warning of what our leaders have in store for us all. The bottom line is: wake up, before it's too late.