The Boston Bombing and Dealey Plaza

[Len Colby]

I hold no brief for the concept of "blowback," which I regard as a CIA fiction serving CIA ends....

Opens with an excellent consideration of the concept of "blowback" - and how useful it is to the forces of tyranny:

"Blowback" vs reality Syria-Russia-Boston Israel

OK an obscure YTer with cheesy shades says so it must be true! I watched the 1st half but he didn't give any evidence and I gave up, did he provide any toward the end?

[Paul Rigby]

We appear to be in the company, er, of CIA aristocracy:

Tsarnaev wife Skull and Bones, CIA family connections

BY 21WIRE, MAY 4, 2013

21st Century Wire says… Another incredible coincidence?

http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/05/04/tsarnaev-wife-skull-and-bones-cia-family-connections/

As more insights into the life and death of dead Boston Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev continues to unfold, based on the available evidence – it’s becoming more and more obvious that he was either an FBI and/or CIA informant (or both), who was chosen to be set up as a fall guy, or patsy for the Boston Bombings. In this instance, he would also have needed a “handler” – someone who could help to steer and influence his day-to-day decision making. That person could be someone was very close to him. This leak appeared on Brasscheck TV’s Facebook page a few days ago:

“CONFIRMED: Katherine Russell (alleged bomber’s wife) is granddaughter of Richard Warren Russell, Skull and Bones member and entrepreneur in the energy industry.

PHOTO: Like his Uncle Ruslan, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Islamic convert wife is connected the highest levels of US intelligence.

Russell’s obituary lists Warren King Russell II as son – and that’s Katherine’s emergency room doctor father.

That means wife had family spook connections as well as husband Tamerlan (Uncle Rusla). And both had fast, dramatic and uncharacteristic conversions to a perverted form of Islam favored by the gangster family that runs Saudi Arabia and works hand in hand with our spooks.

What does a massive coincidence like this mean?

You tell me. All I can do is report the stuff no one else seems to be able to get around to. (Nice in-depth front page article today Washington Post on the “mystery” of Tamerlan that breathes a hint of none of this.)

Katherine reportedly wanted to join the Peace Corps. Maybe she actually joined the agency the Peace Corps is a cover for…”

The CIA is well-known to be a family agency that includes “legacies” in extremely key, or sensitive positions. Katherine’s character in the Tsarnaev story should be looked at more closely, even if, for reasons still yet unknown, she is being completely ignored, and totally unchallenged by the mainstream media. Was she the driving force behind his alleged jihadism, or was she merely keeping a close eye on him?

I would be good for America to know more about Katherine Russell. Her mere presence in this story is an anomaly in itself – one which does not add up at all.

When she is called on to do the talk show circuit, or when her book deal goes live – America will be listening very closely to her story for sure.

Uncle Ruslan: The ‘man in the middle’

Aside from the already documented evidence of the FBI interfacing with the elder Tamerlan Tsarnaev over a 5 year span, we have also placed him at a CIA front NGO conference in Russia, as well as highlighted how incredibly well-connected his now famous Uncle Ruslan Tsarni (his name was changed from Tsarnaev to ‘Tsarni” at some point in the past) is with his ties to some major geopolitical strategic oil ventures in Kazakstan and Central Asia, as well as organised crime figures in the former Soviet countries and the historical CIA-trojan horse organisation known as USAID.

Incredibly, just last September 2012, the Kremlin requested the U.S. close its USAID office in Moscow, with Putin claiming that the NGO was being used to create various opposition group in Russia and being used by Washington to try and unseat him from power. Much has been made of the Tsarnaevs’ loose “Chechen ethnic roots”, a long favoured jihadist hot button for Washington DC and Saudi Arabia in their bid to antagonise Russia.

Regarding the crucial issue of Kazakhstan oil and the CPC & BTC Oil pipelines – all of which Ruslan Tsarni has been a key player in organising, author John Laughland explains, “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’ “They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”

We now know that the ACPC was later sanitised from “Chechnya”, and rebranded to “Caucasus”, now called the “American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus”, the same organisation which held an event attended by none other than Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the summer of 2012 – an event that was organised by the Jamestown Foundation – another known CIA front, which is part of a vast network “controlled by Freedom House (George Soros) and linked to the CIA” according to Voltaire Network.

Hence, any change in US-Russia policies which may result from the Boston event should be view in the context of what we’ve outlined above.

VIDEO: Uncle Ruslan’s career CV is almost unbelievable.

Ruslan is married to CIA head’s daughter

In addition to all this… Ruslan Tsarni was also married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller. Coincidence? Madcow Morning News explains here:

The discovery that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had spy connections that go far deeper than had been previously known is ironic, especially since the mainstream media’s focus yesterday was on a feverish search to find who might have recruited the Tsarnaev brothers. (…) At the time of their marriage, Ruslan Tsarni was known as Ruslan Tsarnaev, the same last name as his nephews Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged bombers. It is unknown when he changed his last name to Tsarni. What is known is that sometime in the early 1990’s, while she was a graduate student in North Carolina, and he was in law school at Duke, Ruslan Tsarnaev met and married Samantha Ankara Fuller, the daughter of Graham and Prudence Fuller of Rockville Maryland. Her middle name suggests a reference to one of her father’s CIA postings. The couple divorced sometime before 2004. Today Ms. Fuller lives abroad, and is a director of several companies pursuing strategies to increase energy production from clean-burning and renewable resources.

On a more ominous note, Graham Fuller was listed as one of the American Deep State rogues on Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery. Edmonds explained it featured subjects of FBI investigations she became aware of during her time as an FBI translator. ”

Hand in Hand - CIA and Skull and Bones

The CIA fraternity is a tight group often bound together by a network of trusted generational family connections running like a vein throughout the agency. Yale University’s elite Skull and Bones fraternity provides legacy framework for an elite inner circle of CIA insiders, and whose graduates include Cabinet members, Presidents and of course, former heads of the CIA.

Now we can add Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s mysterious Anglo-Saxon ‘Islamic convert’ wife, Katherine Russell into the mix as a person of interest, and pose the question whether or not both Tamerlan and his Uncle Ruslan could have been in fact handled in some way… through their unusually well-connected wives?

Either way, this stands as yet another unbelievable coincidence surrounding key faces in the Boston Bombings.

Russell Family also founded Skull and Bones

Katherine Russell has CIA pedigree in the family, but we are not sure yet whether she comes from the original Russell line. Coincidentally, the name Russell plays a central role in American secret societies and many believe that they preside over one of the most influential legacies in American history.

Yale University’s elite Skull and Bones Society was co-founded by none other than William Huntington Russell (1809 – 1885) along with his classmate at the time, Alphonso Taft. The secret society’s alumni organization, which owns the society’s real property and oversees the organization, is called the Russell Trust Association.

Most interestingly, William Huntington Russell came to be a student and protegé of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Russell was particularly impressed with the concept of “thesis versus anti-thesis” which underpins Hegel’s famous ‘dialectic’, where the state is absolute, individuals are granted their freedoms based on their obedience to the state, and where conflict is controlled by an intellectual elite in order to produce a pre-determined outcomes that reinforce the elite’s grip on power. The Hegelian Dialectic recently come to be known as the blueprint behind the concept of the “false flag attack”, embodied in the “problem, reaction, solution” scenario – where you create the problem in order to ignite a public reaction and unbeknownst to the public, a ready-made solution is already prepared and waiting in the wings to be introduced.

William Huntington Russell was also a ‘half-brother’, or cousin, to a man named Samuel Russell, who, through his Russell & Co. trading empire, controlled a large portion of the global opium trade at the time, and who controlled almost all opium entering the United States from overseas. This trade also generated the fortunes of many American dynasty families including the Forbes family (see Robert Bennet Forbes).

Just a coincidence?

This discovery is just one more piece in the continuing pile of coincidences surrounding the FBI’s ‘prime suspects’ in the Boston Bombing event which took place on April 15th, 2013.

What’s even more incredible, is that absolutely no photographs seem to exist whatsoever of Tamerlan and his Islamic convert wife Katherine together. It’s almost as if their ‘marriage’ was something of a staged affair.

Investigators into this story should be suspicious of this unusual family set-up and ask more questions about them and their personal histories.

The media have been instructed not ask any questions regarding the material above – which at the very least connects the Tsarnaev family to the CIA and the crucial geopolitical struggle for power in Eurasia.

Do not expect the major media outlets to look below the surface of the Boston Bombings. Do not expect them to demand any answers other than those which make up the FBI’s official story.

Keep asking these questions.

[Paul Rigby]

We appear to be in the company, er, of CIA aristocracy:

Tsarnaev wife Skull and Bones, CIA family connections

BY 21WIRE, MAY 4, 2013

21st Century Wire says… Another incredible coincidence?

http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/05/04/tsarnaev-wife-skull-and-bones-cia-family-connections/

As more insights into the life and death of dead Boston Bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev continues to unfold, based on the available evidence – it’s becoming more and more obvious that he was either an FBI and/or CIA informant (or both), who was chosen to be set up as a fall guy, or patsy for the Boston Bombings. In this instance, he would also have needed a “handler” – someone who could help to steer and influence his day-to-day decision making. That person could be someone was very close to him.

Compare and contrast with the bio presented by the CIA’s paper of record, the NYT:

Path From ‘Social Butterfly’ to Boston Suspect’s Widow

By MICHAEL COOPER, SERGE F. KOVALESKI, RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and JOHN ELIGON

May 3, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/path-from-social-butterfly-to-suspects-widow-in-hijab.html?pagewanted=all

When Katherine Russell arrived as a freshman at Suffolk University just over five years ago, she seemed to bond so well with her new roommates in their lively dorm opposite Boston Common that one classmate likened them to sitcom characters. “They reminded me of the show ‘Sex and the City,’ ” he recalled. “Two of them were free-spirited, one was materialistic and Katherine was the social butterfly.”

Then Ms. Russell began dating Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a boxer from Cambridge, Mass., known for his flashy clothes, and her life began to change. As he became a steadily more religious Muslim, Ms. Russell converted to Islam. She started to cover her head with a hijab in public, startling some classmates. She dropped out of college in 2010, the year they got married and had a daughter.

She moved into his family’s run-down apartment in Cambridge, trading her old life of New England comfort and privilege — her father and grandfather both went to Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale — for the struggles of an immigrant family, with money so tight that they were on public assistance at times.

Now Ms. Russell, 24, is known around the world as the widow of the man suspected of bombing the Boston Marathon with his brother before he was killed April 19 after a shootout with the police. And she has attracted the interest of the F.B.I., which is trying to determine whether she knew about the bombings or helped the two brothers in any way, knowingly or unknowingly, before or after the attacks.

The surviving bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has told investigators that he and his brother built their bombs in the Cambridge apartment where Ms. Russell lived with Tamerlan, 26, and their daughter, Zahira, a toddler, according to two law enforcement officials. Other officials raised the possibility that the bombs may have been assembled elsewhere.

Investigators are also interested in a text message Ms. Russell sent to her husband after the F.B.I. released photographs of him and his brother a few days after the bombings, two other law enforcement officials said. (This week, the F.B.I. took samples of Ms. Russell’s DNA, and determined that her fingerprints and DNA did not match samples found on some bomb fragments, the officials said.)

Ms. Russell’s lawyers issued a statement saying that the marathon bombings had “caused profound distress and sorrow to Katie and her family” and adding that “the reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock to them all.”

The recent turn of events has stunned Ms. Russell’s friends, relatives, former classmates and neighbors. In North Kingstown, R.I., where she grew up, a newspaper, The Standard-Times, summed up local sentiment in a front-page headline. “NK native widow of Boston bombing suspect,” it read. “Former high school classmate calls situation ‘odd.’ ”

Ms. Russell grew up in a comfortable home on a leafy street there, the daughter of a doctor. Stephen Constantine, 23, who, like Ms. Russell, played alto saxophone in a middle school band, recalled her as popular and a good musician. “She could play more complex music than I could and learn it faster, and her sound was warmer and fuller bodied,” he said. In high school, she won an award for her drawing of a cat menacing a mouse. “It was a large colored-pencil drawing of a black cat with its paw raised and a gray mouse scooching out of the way,” her art teacher, Amos Trout Paine, recalled. She quoted a David Bowie song, “Quicksand,” in her high school yearbook.

Shortly after graduating, she had a brush with the law: she was arrested and charged with shoplifting five items worth $67 from an Old Navy at the Warwick Mall, according to a police report. She performed community service and paid money toward a general restitution fund that benefits crime victims, and the case was dismissed. The lawyer who represented her, J. Patrick O’Neill, who serves in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, said he could not recall details of the case or much about Ms. Russell.

In 2007, she moved to Boston to major in communications at Suffolk. It was there that friends introduced her to Mr. Tsarnaev, who had gone to a nearby community college. They dated on and off, people who knew them said, and eventually Ms. Russell converted to Islam.

She seemed to embrace her new religion willingly and enthusiastically, said someone who occasionally attended Russell family gatherings, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to betray the family’s confidence. “She was infatuated with this guy, and she adopted that religion,” the person said, recalling a dinner in Boston when she announced that she had decided to start wearing a head scarf as part of her faith. “It was a big surprise.”

Mr. Tsarnaev had a rough side: a domestic violence complaint was lodged against him in 2009 by another girlfriend, officials said. His father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said last month that he had “hit her lightly.”

But things seemed promising for the young couple in 2010, said Julian Pollard, 31, a boxer who recounted a conversation with Mr. Tsarnaev that year at a Golden Gloves tournament in Lowell, Mass. “He said the training was going great, that he was happy with his faith and that he had just met a girl and he was very happy about that,” he said. “He told me that he was engaged to her, or was about to propose.”

They married on June 21, 2010, in a 15-minute ceremony in an office on the third floor of the Masjid Al Quran, on a quiet residential street in Dorchester. Imam Taalib Mahdee said that he had not met the couple before the ceremony, and that she was the one who had called and asked to be married there. “They were a happy couple,” he said. Their marriage certificate listed his occupation as driver, hers as student.

But Ms. Russell did not go back to college that fall. Mr. Tsarnaev, who had given up boxing after being barred from national Golden Gloves tournaments because he was not a United States citizen, was growing increasingly religious, neighbors said. Money was scarce: the family’s income was supplemented by public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, state officials said. And last year, Mr. Tsarnaev left his wife and daughter behind in Cambridge for six months while he traveled to Dagestan to see his father, and to visit Chechnya.

Her mother-in-law, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, said in an interview that Mr. Tsarnaev had wanted Ms. Russell and their child to move to Dagestan with him, and that she had been thinking of it. “She herself agreed; she said she wanted to study a different culture, language,” Ms. Tsarnaeva said.

At times Ms. Russell supported the family by working as a home health aide — “working long hours, caring for people in their homes who are unable to care for themselves,” her lawyers said in the statement.

One neighbor said that Ms. Russell often seemed shy and quiet in the presence of her husband, but warmer and friendlier when he was not around. Another neighbor recalled hearing yells coming from the apartment.

A relative said that Ms. Russell attended family gatherings less frequently, and withdrew a little from her old social life. “I think she believes in Islam,” said the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and who said that she had seemed happy with her husband. “I don’t think she was coerced. I think she’s faithful to the religion.”

On April 19, as the news spread that the Tsarnaev brothers were believed to have committed the marathon bombings and had gone on a nightlong crime spree that involved the fatal shooting of a campus police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a carjacking and a gunfight with the police in which Tamerlan was killed, a neighbor knocked at the door of their third-floor apartment in Cambridge, where Ms. Russell had apparently just heard the news from a relative. “She was in utter shock,” the neighbor said. “Utter shock.”

Then law enforcement officers arrived and ordered them all out. Their downstairs neighbor Albrect Ammon, 18, said that Ms. Russell, who was dressed all in black, tried to borrow a cellphone from another woman, but an officer snatched it away, saying she was the suspect’s wife.

Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum and Jennifer Preston from New York, Deborah Sontag from Boston and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Research was contributed by Sheelagh McNeill, Susan Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Jack Styczynski.

[Len Colby]

We appear to be in the company, er, of CIA aristocracy:

Tsarnaev wife Skull and Bones, CIA family connections

BY 21WIRE, MAY 4, 2013

21st Century Wire says… Another incredible coincidence?

http://21stcenturywire.com/2013/05/04/tsarnaev-wife-skull-and-bones-cia-family-connections/

Yawn, that was even lamer than the stuff you posted here previously. No link is supplied to the supposed “obituary”, Warren King Russell II is presumably the son of Warren King Russell Sr. Nor is evidence given than that Katherine Russell's father Warren Russell is Warren King Russell II. To make it even weaker the author never explicitly claimed that Richard Warren Russell was tied to the CIA or any other intelligence agency and failed to provide any evidence he had been (uga-booga) a member of Skull and Bones. Nor did he make a case we should care if indeed had been a member of the society. The rest of the article is crapolla we've been over before.

[Paul Rigby]

Terror Acts in US: Who Gains? (I)

Olga SHEDROVA, Strategic Culture Foundation, 03.05.2013

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/05/03/terror-acts-in-us-who-gains-i.html

If the terrorist acts had not taken place, they should have been invented. Since a long time the weakening of US global clout has been an issue in focus. The Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World report says the US economic and military leadership is going to become a thing of the past pretty soon. Instigating anti-terror campaign invariably serves US interests. First: it facilitates solution of internal problems. Second, the vanishing empire has no chances to preserve global hegemony. So, it is absolutely important to prevent global competitors from getting hold of and dividing the heritage.

What has really happened?

According to official version, the Tsarnaev brothers, the Chechens by origin, are the perpetrators of crime. It means a Russian trace is found from the very start, something to inevitably affect the US-Russian relations. Now, it is expected that Russia will be accused of not doing enough to fight «Islamic terrorism», something to be followed by demands to allow US military presence on Russian, Central Asia and Caucasus soil.

The Boston tragedy is not the only terrorist act on US soil taking place in a short period of time. The explosions in Texas and Atlanta, the ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Senators Roger Wicker and Carl Levin, all these actions are instigating panic in the country. But it strikes an eye that in other cases the perpetrators are not given so much attention to, if any. Perhaps it’s not so easy to create an enemy image that would be convincing enough to be imposed on the world. And a lot of things are really peculiar here…

First, the terrorist acts had very different patterns and wild geography to be committed by one organization. Second, no group has claimed responsibility so far, though publicity is something terrorists want normally. Third, there are too many inconsistencies.

The Boston bombs are reported to be made from ordinary pressure cookers. Like if planned by scenario, the information popped up right in time to make remember that an English language media outlet published an article describing the way to make a pressure cooker bomb in 2010. So, it’s hard to imagine Arab speaking terrorists discuss the bomb making process in native tongue keeping away from other people who could hear them. As one can see, it was enough just to post the information in a common accessible-for-all internet outlet in the language the US anti-terrorist agencies could understand. And it would sure get the attention of interested audience and be used in the right place when the time comes.

The second inconsistency is the Boston marathon pictures with Navy SEALs around. The uniform and detonators are to easily distinguishable for people and cameras, installed in great number in US cities after the 9/11.

Third - an egregious blunder. The Facebook page devoted to Boston explosion victims had appeared a few hours before the event actually took place. The posting time was 7.37. The explosion time was around 1500. Neither terrorists, nor US special services ever gave a reason to be suspected of mental retardation. So the action had been planned in advance to strike the attention of amateur-conspirologists.

Special services practice cover-up operations, things like stuffing open sources with information destined to divert attention from real deeds and plans. The presence of uniformed SEALS on pictures and visible slip-up related to the Facebook page look like disguised cover-up. The home-grown conspirologists will reveal the «scoop», while readers will be satisfied spreading open secrets around.

Real goals and the people behind the Boston tragedy are not known and there is a little chance it will ever come in the open. But the question who benefits from intensification of «fight against terrorism» is easier to answer.

After the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001, $800 billion have been spent to upgrade US security. As a result of fiscal cliff, the US faces $85 billion cuts this year, including $46 billion for the military. The cuts to government agencies total $1.2 trillion over 10 years. 800,000 civilian employees are facing furloughs, the Navy is to ground four air wings, and the Air Force will reduce training flights. The United States has already cancelled the plans to deploy advanced versions of missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased,

At the same time the Obama policy evokes angry reaction from Republican hawks. For instance, the decision to suspend the fourth phase of missile defense plans in Europe made them accuse the President of collusion with Moscow. The reluctance to launch military intervention in Syria and Iran, the «betrayal» of Israel and military cuts also pour gasoline into the fire.

The Financial Times says tense debates on US security issues are to start in a few days. Influential German Die Welt points out the Boston act investigation means a lot for Obama. The Americans may question his credibility concerning security matters.

The cookers explosions, allegedly an open secret since 2010, and the Facebook dumb move - it all illustrated the Obama’s inability to tackle the issues related to national security. It’s a bit more complicated with SEALs; the President will have hard time proving that he never ordered the Special Forces to start man hunting their own citizens. Obviously, the temptation is high to accuse the Democrats of failing to properly control the special services.

Whatever, the new wave of terror across the United States will certainly spur the increase of expenditure for military and fight against terror purposes. Just exactly what the military lobby wants.

«New world order» and Jihad alliance

The 9/11 tragedy entailed the «global fight against terror» declared by then President Bush Jr. In reality it resulted in Al Qaeda branches coming to power in many countries of Middle East and boosting US presence in Eurasia. It seems to be surprising at first glance. But the United States launched the practice of using terrorism to its advantage as far back as the middle of the XX century. The best example is Irangate under Ronald Reagan. Then the Central Intelligence Agency sold arms to Iranian terrorists to use the money for funding Nicaraguan contras.

The United States played the main part in provoking the rise of «Islamic terrorism». Back in January 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski promulgated the long-term «strategy of tension» in the region; being employed to ultimately divide and conquer the Middle East and Central Asia. The aim was the destabilization of the region’s countries in the name of preserving the West’s hegemony over the «Arc of Crisis.» According to him, thought threatening for the West, it was the best weapon against the Soviet Union.

The Global Research has published the article by Professor Peter Dale Scott called The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists. The article says «Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, «We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War». CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists like Osama Bin Laden to help him in efforts to create the Arab-Afghan Foreign Legion (would-be Al Qaeda). According to Scott, Al Qaeda has been a chief US ally in all wars since 1989. For instance, the US supported Islamists in Bosnia and Kosovo; in 1993 the formations of Al Qaeda were used to topple the President of Azerbaijan. Al Qaeda provoked interventions in Afghanistan and Sudan, Islamic terrorists are used by the US to boost its presence in Central Asia and separate the Caucasus from Russia.

The extremists are sparring partners of the US fighting the «axis of evil», creating pretexts for accusing the US adversaries of involvement into terrorist activities. In January-February 2012, the United States and the European Union adopted «crippling sanctions» to make Iranian economy go down. Other countries were reluctant to join, as well as some US and European businessmen. Like if on order, an explosion took place near the Israeli embassy in Delhi, at the very same time it was reported an explosive device was found near the embassy of Israel in Tbilisi. Iran was to blame, the sanctions were approved. The Iranian trace appears to be leading to the Mujahidin-e-Khalq Organization, which is extremely hostile to the incumbent Iranian government. The United States planned to delete it from the terrorist list. World media shied away from highlighting the issue.

Today the US longtime allies from the ranks of Muslim Brothers and Al Qaeda have surfaced the wave of the Arab Spring to come to power in some countries of Maghreb and the Middle East, Washington has supported extremists fighting legitimate governments in Libya and Syria.

(To be concluded)

[Paul Rigby]

The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”

Andrew Gavin MARSHALL , 06.09.2010

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/09/06/the-imperial-anatomy-of-al-qaeda-the-cia-drug-running-terrorist.html

As the 9th anniversary of 9/11 nears, and the war on terror continues to be waged and grows in ferocity and geography, it seems all the more imperative to return to the events of that fateful September morning and re-examine the reasons for war and the nature of the stated culprit, Al-Qaeda.

The events of 9/11 pervade the American and indeed the world imagination as an historical myth. The events of that day and those leading up to it remain largely unknown and little understood by the general public, apart from the disturbing images repeated ad nauseam in the media. The facts and troubled truths of that day are lost in the folklore of the 9/11 myth: that the largest attack carried out on American ground was orchestrated by 19 Muslims armed with box cutters and urged on by religious fundamentalism, all under the direction of Osama bin Laden, the leader of a global terrorist network called al-Qaeda, based out of a cave in Afghanistan.

The myth sweeps aside the facts and complex nature of terror, al-Qaeda, the American empire and literally defies the laws of physics. As John F. Kennedy once said, “The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.”

This three-part series on “The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda” examines the geopolitical historical origins and nature of what we today know as al-Qaeda, which is in fact an Anglo-American intelligence network of terrorist assets used to advance American and NATO imperial objectives in various regions around the world.

Part 1 examines the origins of the intelligence network known as the Safari Club, which financed and organized an international conglomerate of terrorists, the CIA’s role in the global drug trade, the emergence of the Taliban and the origins of al-Qaeda.

The Safari Club

Following Nixon’s resignation as President, Gerald Ford became the new US President in 1974. Henry Kissinger remained as Secretary of State and Ford brought into his administration two names that would come to play important roles in the future of the American Empire: Donald Rumsfeld as Ford’s Chief of Staff, and Dick Cheney, as Deputy Assistant to the President. The Vice President was Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller’s brother. When Donald Rumsfeld was promoted to Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney was promoted to Chief of Staff. Ford had also appointed a man named George H.W. Bush as CIA Director.

In 1976, a coalition of intelligence agencies was formed, which was called the Safari Club. This marked the discreet and highly covert coordination among various intelligence agencies, which would last for decades. It formed at a time when the CIA was embroiled in domestic scrutiny over the Watergate scandal and a Congressional investigation into covert CIA activities, forcing the CIA to become more covert in its activities.

In 2002, the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal gave a speech in which he stated that in response to the CIA’s need for more discretion, “a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran [under the Shah].”[1] However, “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations. With the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as the head of the CIA,” Saudi intelligence chief, Kamal Adham, “transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.”[2]

As CIA director, George H.W. Bush “cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider.” Adham had previously acted as a “channel between [Henry] Kissinger and [Egyptian President] Anwar Sadat” in 1972. In 1976, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia formed the Safari Club “to conduct through their own intelligence agencies operations that were now difficult for the CIA,” which was largely organized by the head of French intelligence, Alexandre de Marenches.[3]

The “Arc of Crisis” and the Iranian Revolution

When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, he appointed over two-dozen members of the Trilateral Commission to his administration, which was an international think tank formed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller in 1973. Brzezinski had invited Carter to join the Trilateral Commission, and when Carter became President, Brzezinski became National Security Adviser; Cyrus Vance, also a member of the Commission, became Secretary of State; and Samuel Huntington, another Commission member, became Coordinator of National Security and Deputy to Brzezinski. Author and researcher Peter Dale Scott deserves much credit for his comprehensive analysis of the events leading up to and during the Iranian Revolution in his book, “The Road to 9/11”,* which provides much of the information below.

Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski were to determine the US policy position in the Cold War, and the US-Soviet policy they created was termed, “Cooperation and Competition,” in which Brzezinski would press for “Cooperation” when talking to the press, yet, privately push for “competition.” So, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, Brzezinski was pushing for American supremacy over the Soviet Union. Brzezinski and Vance would come to disagree on almost every issue.[4]

In 1978, Zbigniew Brzezinski gave a speech in which he stated, “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.” The Arc of Crisis stretched from Indochina to southern Africa, although, more specifically, the particular area of focus was “the nations that stretch across the southern flank of the Soviet Union from the Indian subcontinent to Turkey, and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn of Africa.” Further, the “center of gravity of this arc is Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer and for more than two decades a citadel of U.S. military and economic strength in the Middle East. Now it appears that the 37-year reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is almost over, ended by months of rising civil unrest and revolution.”[5]

With rising discontent in the region, “There was this idea that the Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets. It was a Brzezinski concept.”[6] A month prior to Brzezinski’s speech, in November of 1978, “President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski.” Further, “Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini.”[7] George Ball’s visit to Iran was a secret mission.[8]

Throughout 1978, the Shah was under the impression that “the Carter administration was plotting to topple his regime.” In 1978, the Queen and Shah’s wife, told Manouchehr Ganji, a minister in the Shah’s government, that, “I wanted to tell you that the Americans are maneuvering to bring down the Shah,” and she continued saying that she believed “they even want to topple the regime.”[9] The US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, thought that the revolution would succeed, and told this to Ramsey Clark, former US Attorney General under the Johnson administration, as well as professor Richard Falk, when they were visiting Sullivan in Iran in 1978. Clark and Falk then went from Iran to Paris, to visit Khomeini, who was there in exile. James Bill, a Carter adviser, felt that, “a religious movement brought about with the United States’ assistance would be a natural friend of the United States.”[10]

Also interesting is the fact that the British BBC broadcast pro-Khomeini Persian-language programs daily in Iran, as a subtle form of propaganda, which “gave credibility to the perception of United States and British support of Khomeini.”[11] The BBC refused to give the Shah a platform to respond, and “[r]epeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no result.”[12]

In the May 1979 meeting of the Bilderberg Group, Bernard Lewis, a British historian of great influence (hence, the Bilderberg membership), presented a British-American strategy which, “endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.”[13] Further, it would prevent Soviet influence from entering the Middle East, as the Soviet Union was viewed as an empire of atheism and godlessness: essentially a secular and immoral empire, which would seek to impose secularism across Muslim countries. So supporting radical Islamic groups would mean that the Soviet Union would be less likely to have any influence or relations with Middle Eastern countries, making the US a more acceptable candidate for developing relations.

A 1979 article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, described the Arc of Crisis, saying that, “The Middle East constitutes its central core. Its strategic position is unequalled: it is the last major region of the Free World directly adjacent to the Soviet Union, it holds in its subsoil about three-fourths of the proven and estimated world oil reserves, and it is the locus of one of the most intractable conflicts of the twentieth century: that of Zionism versus Arab nationalism.” It went on to explain that post-war US policy in the region was focused on “containment” of the Soviet Union, as well as access to the regions oil.[14] The article continued, explaining that the most “obvious division” within the Middle East is, “that which separates the Northern Tier (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan) from the Arab core,” and that, “After World War II, Turkey and Iran were the two countries most immediately threatened by Soviet territorial expansionism and political subversion.”[15] Ultimately, “the Northern Tier was assured of a serious and sustained American commitment to save it from sharing the fate of Eastern Europe.”[16]

While Khomeini was in Paris prior to the Revolution, a representative of the French President organized a meeting between Khomeini and “current world powers,” in which Khomeini made certain demands, such as, “the shah's removal from Iran and help in avoiding a coup d'état by the Iranian Army.” The Western powers, however, “were worried about the Soviet Union's empowerment and penetration and a disruption in Iran's oil supply to the west. Khomeini gave the necessary guarantees. These meetings and contacts were taking place in January of 1979, just a few days before the Islamic Revolution in February 1979.”[17] In February of 1979, Khomeini was flown out of Paris on an Air France flight, to return to Iran, “with the blessing of Jimmy Carter.”[18] Ayatollah Khomeini named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government on February 4, 1979. As Khomeini had demanded during his Paris meeting in January 1979, that western powers must help in avoiding a coup by the Iranian Army; in that same month, the Carter administration, under the direction of Brzezinski, had begun planning a military coup.[19]

Could this have been planned in the event that Khomeini was overthrown, the US would quickly reinstate order, perhaps even place Khomeini back in power? Interestingly, in January of 1979, “as the Shah was about to leave the country, the American Deputy Commander in NATO, General Huyser, arrived and over a period of a month conferred constantly with Iranian military leaders. His influence may have been substantial on the military's decision not to attempt a coup and eventually to yield to the Khomeini forces, especially if press reports are accurate that he or others threatened to withhold military supplies if a coup were attempted.”[20] No coup was subsequently undertaken, and Khomeini came to power as the Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As tensions increased among the population within Iran, the US sent “security advisers” to Iran to pressure the Shah’s SAVAK (secret police) to implement “a policy of ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize popular antipathy to the Shah.” The Carter administration also began publicly criticizing the Shah’s human rights abuses.[21] On September 6, 1978, the Shah banned demonstrations, and the following day, between 700 and 2000 demonstrators were gunned down, following “advice from Brzezinski to be firm.”[22]

The US Ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, a Trilateral Commission member, said that, “Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint,” and the US Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, said, “Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure,” while Carter’s adviser, James Bill, said that Khomeini was a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.”[23]

The Shah was also very sick in late 1978 and early 1979. So the Shah fled Iran in January of 1979 to the Bahamas, allowing for the revolution to take place. It is especially interesting to understand the relationship between David Rockefeller and the Shah of Iran. David Rockefeller’s personal assistant, Joseph V. Reed, had been “assigned to handle the shah’s finances and his personal needs;” Robert Armao, who worked for Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, was sent to “act as the shah’s public relations agent and lobbyist;” and Benjamin H. Kean, “a longtime associate of Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller,” and David Rockefeller’s “personal physician,” who was sent to Mexico when the shah was there, and advised that he “be treated at an American hospital.”[24]

It is important to note that Rockefeller interests “had directed U.S. policy in Iran since the CIA coup of 1953.”[25] Following the Shah’s flight from Iran, there were increased pressures within the United States by a handful of powerful people to have the Shah admitted to the United States. These individuals were Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, John J. McCloy, former statesman and senior member of the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, who was also a lawyer for Chase Manhattan, and of course, David Rockefeller.[26]

Chase Manhattan Bank had more interests in Iran than any other US bank. In fact, the Shah had “ordered that all his government’s major operating accounts be held at Chase and that letters of credit for the purchase of oil be handled exclusively through Chase. The bank also became the agent and lead manager for many of the loans to Iran. In short, Iran became the crown jewel of Chase’s international banking portfolio.”[27]

The Iranian interim government, headed by Prime Minister Bazargan, collapsed in November of 1979, when Iranian hostages seized the US Embassy in Teheran. However, there is much more to this event than meets the eye. During the time of the interim government (February, 1979 to November, 1979), several actions were undertaken which threatened some very powerful interests who had helped the Ayatollah into power.

Chase Manhattan Bank faced a liquidity crisis as there had been billions in questionable loans to Iran funneled through Chase.[28] Several of Chase’s loans were “possibly illegal under the Iranian constitution.”[29] Further, in February of 1979, once the interim government was put in power, it began to take “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors.” Also, the interim government “wanted Chase Manhattan to return Iranian assets, which Rockefeller put at more than $1 billion in 1978, although some estimates ran much higher,” which could have “created a liquidity crisis for the bank which already was coping with financial troubles.”[30]

With the seizure of the American Embassy in Iran, President Carter took moves to freeze Iranian financial assets. As David Rockefeller wrote in his book, “Carter’s ‘freeze’ of official Iranian assets protected our [Chase Manhattan’s] position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it.”[31]

In February of 1979, Iran had been taking “steps to market its oil independently of the Western oil majors. In 1979, as in 1953, a freeze of Iranian assets made this action more difficult.”[32] This was significant for Chase Manhattan not simply because of the close interlocking of the board with those of oil companies, not to mention Rockefeller himself, who is patriarch of the family whose name is synonymous with oil, but also because Chase exclusively handled all the letters of credit for the purchase of Iranian oil.[33]

The Shah being accepted into the United States, under public pressure from Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller, precipitated the hostage crisis, which occurred on November 4. Ten days later, Carter froze all Iranian assets in US banks, on the advice of his Treasury Secretary, William Miller. Miller just happened to have ties to Chase Manhattan Bank.[34]

Although Chase Manhattan directly benefited from the seizure of Iranian assets, the reasoning behind the seizure as well as the events leading up to it, such as a hidden role for the Anglo-Americans behind the Iranian Revolution, bringing the Shah to America, which precipitated the hostage crisis, cannot simply be relegated to personal benefit for Chase. There were larger designs behind this crisis. So the 1979 crises in Iran cannot simply be pawned off as a spur of the moment undertaking, but rather should be seen as quick actions taken upon a perceived opportunity. The opportunity was the rising discontent within Iran at the Shah; the quick actions were in covertly pushing the country into Revolution.

In 1979, “effectively restricting the access of Iran to the global oil market, the Iranian assets freeze became a major factor in the huge oil price increases of 1979 and 1981.”[35] Added to this, in 1979, British Petroleum cancelled major oil contracts for oil supply, which along with cancellations taken by Royal Dutch Shell, drove the price of oil up higher.[36] With the first major oil price rises in 1973 (urged on by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger), the Third World was forced to borrow heavily from US and European banks to finance development. With the second oil price shocks of 1979, the US Federal Reserve, with Paul Volcker as its new Chairman, (himself having served a career under David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan), dramatically raised interest rates from 2% in the late 70s to 18% in the early 80s. Developing nations could not afford to pay such interest on their loans, and thus the 1980s debt crisis spread throughout the Third World, with the IMF and World Bank coming to the “rescue” with their Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), which ensured western control over the developing world’s economies.[37]

Covertly, the United States helped a radical Islamist government come to power in Iran, “the center of the Arc of Crisis,” and then immediately stirred up conflict and war in the region. Five months before Iraq invaded Iran, in April of 1980, Zbigniew Brzezinski openly declared the willingness of the US to work closely with Iraq. Two months before the war, Brzezinski met with Saddam Hussein in Jordan, where he gave support for the destabilization of Iran.[38] While Saddam was in Jordan, he also met with three senior CIA agents, which was arranged by King Hussein of Jordan. He then went to meet with King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, informing him of his plans to invade Iran, and then met with the King of Kuwait to inform him of the same thing. He gained support from America, and financial and arms support from the Arab oil producing countries. Arms to Iraq were funneled through Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.[39] The war lasted until 1988 and resulted in over a million deaths.

This was the emergence of the “strategy of tension” in the “Arc of Crisis,” in particular, the covert support (whether in arming, training, or financing) of radical Islamic elements to foment violence and conflict in a region. It was the old imperial tactic of ‘divide and conquer’: pit the people against each other so that they cannot join forces against the imperial power. This violence and radical Islamism would further provide the pretext for which the US and its imperial allies could then engage in war and occupation within the region, all the while securing its vast economic and strategic interests.

The “Arc of Crisis” in Afghanistan: The Safari Club in Action

In 1978, the progressive Taraki government in Afghanistan managed to incur the anger of the United States due to “its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies.”[40] The Afghan government was widely portrayed in the West as “Communist” and thus, a threat to US national security. The government, did, however, undertake friendly policies and engagement with the Soviet Union, but was not a Communist government.

In 1978, as the new government came to power, almost immediately the US began covertly funding rebel groups through the CIA.[41] In 1979, Zbigniew Brzezinski worked closely with his aid from the CIA, Robert Gates (who is currently Secretary of Defense), in shifting President Carter’s Islamic policy. As Brzezinski said in a 1998 interview with a French publication:

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, secretly 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.[42]

Brzezinski elaborated, saying he “Knowingly increased the probability that [the Soviets] would invade,” and he recalled writing to Carter on the day of the Soviet invasion that, “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.” When asked about the repercussions for such support in fostering the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Brzezinski responded, “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?”[43]

As author Peter Dale Scott pointed out in, The Road to 9/11:*

For generations in both Afghanistan and the Soviet Muslim Republics the dominant form of Islam had been local and largely Sufi. The decision to work with the Saudi and Pakistani secret services meant that billions of CIA and Saudi dollars would ultimately be spent in programs that would help enhance the globalistic and Wahhabistic jihadism that are associated today with al Qaeda.[44]

Hafizullah Amin, a top official in Taraki’s government, who many believed to be a CIA asset, orchestrated a coup in September of 1979, and “executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.”[45] The Soviets also intervened in order to replace Amin, who was seen as “unpredictable and extremist” with “the more moderate Barbak Karmal.”[46]

The Soviet invasion thus prompted the US national security establishment to undertake the largest covert operation in history. When Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in 1981, the covert assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen not only continued on the path set by Brzezinski but it rapidly accelerated, as did the overall strategy in the “Arc of Crisis.” When Reagan became President, his Vice President became George H.W. Bush, who, as CIA director during the Ford administration, had helped establish the Safari Club intelligence network and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in Pakistan. In the “campaign to aid the Afghan rebels ... BCCI clearly emerged as a U.S. intelligence asset,” and CIA Director “Casey began to use the outside – the Saudis, the Pakistanis, BCCI – to run what they couldn’t get through Congress. [bCCI president] Abedi had the money to help,” and the CIA director had “met repeatedly” with the president of BCCI.[47]

Thus, in 1981, Director Casey of the CIA worked with Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal who ran the Saudi intelligence agency GID, and the Pakistani ISI “to create a foreign legion of jihadi Muslims or so-called Arab Afghans.” This idea had “originated in the elite Safari Club that had been created by French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches.”[48]

In 1986, the CIA backed a plan by the Pakistani ISI “to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad.” Subsequently:

More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by CIA and MI6, with the SAS [british Special Forces] training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.[49]

CIA funding for the operations “was funneled through General Zia and the ISI in Pakistan.”[50] Interestingly, Robert Gates, who previously served as assistant to Brzezinski in the National Security Council, stayed on in the Reagan-Bush administration as executive assistant to CIA director Casey, and who is currently Secretary of Defense.

The Global Drug Trade and the CIA

As a central facet of the covert financing and training of the Afghan Mujahideen, the role of the drug trade became invaluable. The global drug trade has long been used by empires for fuelling and financing conflict with the aim of facilitating imperial domination.

In 1773, the British colonial governor in Bengal “established a colonial monopoly on the sale of opium.” As Alfred W. McCoy explained in his masterful book, The Politics of Heroin:

As the East India Company expanded production, opium became India’s main export. [. . . ] Over the next 130 years, Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium to China, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China’s opium market for its merchants. Using its military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a vast drug market and in accelerating opium cultivation throughout China. By 1900 China had 13.5 million addicts consuming 39,000 tons of opium.[51]

In Indochina in the 1940s and 50s, the French intelligence services “enabled the opium trade to survive government suppression efforts,” and subsequently, “CIA activities in Burma helped transform the Shan states from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium-growing region in the world.”[52] The CIA did this by supporting the Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma for an invasion of China, and facilitated its monopolization and expansion of the opium trade, allowing the KMT to remain in Burma until a coup in 1961, when they were driven into Laos and Thailand.[53] The CIA subsequently played a very large role in the facilitation of the drugs trade in Laos and Vietnam throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.[54]

It was during the 1980s that “the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market,” as:

Until the late 1970s, tribal farmers in the highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan grew limited quantities of opium and sold it to merchant caravans bound west for Iran and east to India. In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America.[55]

In 1977, General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan launched a military coup, “imposed a harsh martial-law regime,” and executed former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (father to Benazir Bhutto). When Zia came to power, the Pakistani ISI was a “minor military intelligence unit,” but, under the “advice and assistance of the CIA,” General Zia transformed the ISI “into a powerful covert unit and made it the strong arm of his martial-law regime.”[56]

The CIA and Saudi money flowed not only to weapons and training for the Mujahideen, but also into the drug trade. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq appointed General Fazle Haq as the military governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), who would “consult with Brzezinski on developing an Afghan resistance program,” and who became a CIA asset. When CIA Director Casey or Vice President George H.W. Bush reviewed the CIA Afghan operation, they went to see Haq; who by 1982, was considered by Interpol to be an international narcotics trafficker. Haq moved much of the narcotics money through the BCCI.[57]

In May of 1979, prior to the December invasion of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, a CIA envoy met with Afghan resistance leaders in a meeting organized by the ISI. The ISI “offered the CIA envoy an alliance with its own Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” who led a small guerilla group. The CIA accepted, and over the following decade, half of the CIA’s aid went to Hekmatyar’s guerillas.[58] Hekmatyar became Afghanistan’s leading mujahideen drug lord, and developed a “complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan).”[59]

The US subsequently, through the 1980s, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, gave Hekmatyar more than $1 billion in armaments. Immediately, heroin began flowing from Afghanistan to America. By 1980, drug-related deaths in New York City rose 77% since 1979.[60] By 1981, the drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of America’s heroin. Trucks going into Afghanistan with CIA arms from Pakistan would return with heroin “protected by ISI papers from police search.”[61]

Haq, the CIA asset in Pakistan, “was also running the drug trade,” of which the bank BCCI “was completely involved.” In the 1980s, the CIA insisted that the ISI create “a special cell for the use of heroin for covert actions.” Elaborating:

This cell promoted the cultivation of opium and the extraction of heroin in Pakistani territory as well as in the Afghan territory under Mujahideen control for being smuggled into Soviet controlled areas in order to make the Soviet troops heroin addicts.[62]

This plan apparently originated at the suggestion of French intelligence chief and founder of the Safari Club, Alexandre de Marenches, who recommended it to CIA Director Casey.[63]

In the 1980s, one program undertaken by the United States was to finance Mujahideen propaganda in textbooks for Afghan schools. The US gave the Mujahideen $43 million in “non-lethal” aid for the textbook project alone, which was given by USAID: “The U.S. Agency for International Development, [uSAID] coordinated its work with the CIA, which ran the weapons program,” and “The U.S. government told the AID to let the Afghan war chiefs decide the school curriculum and the content of the textbooks.”[64]

The textbooks were “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings,” and “were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines.” Even since the covert war of the 1980s, the textbooks “have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books.” The books were developed through a USAID grant to the “University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies,” and when the books were smuggled into Afghanistan through regional military leaders, “Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines.” USAID stopped this funding in 1994.[65]

The Rise of the Taliban

When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the fighting continued between the Afghan government backed by the USSR and the Mujahideen backed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so too did its aid to the Afghan government, which itself was overthrown in 1992. However, fighting almost immediately broke out between rival factions vying for power, including Hekmatyar.

In the early 1990s, an obscure group of “Pashtun country folk” had become a powerful military and political force in Afghanistan, known as the Taliban.[66] The Taliban “surfaced as a small militia force operating near Kandahar city during the spring and summer of 1994, carrying out vigilante attacks against minor warlords.” As growing discontent with the warlords grew, so too did the reputation of the Taliban.[67]

The Taliban acquired an alliance with the ISI in 1994, and throughout 1995, the relationship between the Taliban and the ISI accelerated and “became more and more of a direct military alliance.” The Taliban ultimately became “an asset of the ISI” and “a client of the Pakistan army.”[68] Further, “Between 1994 and 1996, the USA supported the Taliban politically through its allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, essentially because Washington viewed the Taliban as anti-Iranian, anti-Shia, and pro-Western.”[69]

Selig Harrison, a scholar with the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars and “a leading US expert on South Asia,” said at a conference in India that the CIA worked with Pakistan to create the Taliban. Harrison has “extensive contact” with the CIA, as “he had meetings with CIA leaders at the time when Islamic forces were being strengthened in Afghanistan,” while he was a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As he further revealed in 2001, “The CIA still has close links with the ISI.”[70] By 1996, the Taliban had control of Kandahar, but still fighting and instability continued in the country.

Osama and Al-Qaeda

Between 1980 and 1989, roughly $600 million was passed through Osama bin Laden’s charity front organizations, specifically the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), also known as Al-Kifah. The money mostly originated with wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia and other areas in the Persian Gulf, and was funneled through his charity fronts to arm and fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan.[71]

In the 1980s, the British Special Forces (SAS) were training mujahideen in Afghanistan, as well as in secret camps in Scotland, and the SAS is largely taking orders from the CIA. The CIA also indirectly begins to arm Osama bin Laden.[72] Osama bin Laden’s front charity, the MAK, “was nurtured” by the Pakistani ISI.[73]

Osama bin Laden was reported to have been personally recruited by the CIA in 1979 in Istanbul. He had the close support of Prince Turki bin Faisal, his friend and head of Saudi intelligence, and also developed ties with Hekmatyar in Afghanistan,[74] both of whom were pivotal figures in the CIA-Safari Club network. General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, the head of the Pakistani ISI from 1980 to 1987, would meet regularly with Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and they formed a partnership in demanding a tax on the opium trade from warlords so that by 1985, bin Laden and the ISI were splitting the profits of over $100 million per year.[75] In 1985, Osama bin Laden’s brother, Salem, stated that Osama was “the liaison between the US, the Saudi government, and the Afghan rebels.”[76]

In 1988, Bin Laden discussed “the establishment of a new military group,” which would come to be known as Al-Qaeda.[77] Osama bin Laden’s charity front, the MAK, (eventually to form Al-Qaeda) founded the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, New York, to recruit Muslims for the jihad against the Soviets. The al-Kifah Center was founded in the late 1980s with the support of the U.S. government, which provided visas for known terrorists associated with the organization, including Ali Mohamed, the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and possibly the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta.[78]

This coincided with the creation of Al-Qaeda, of which the al-Kifah Center was a recruiting front. Foot soldiers for Al-Qaeda were “admitted to the United States for training under a special visa program.” The FBI had been surveilling the training of terrorists, however, “it terminated this surveillance in the fall of 1989.” In 1990, the CIA granted Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman a visa to come run the al-Kifah Center, who was considered an “untouchable” as he was “being protected by no fewer than three agencies,” including the State Department, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.[79]

Robin Cook, a former British MP and Minister of Foreign Affairs wrote that Al-Qaeda, “literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”[80] Thus, “Al-Qaeda” was born as an instrument of western intelligence agencies. This account of al-Qaeda was further corroborated by a former French military intelligence agent, who stated that, “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database,” and that it remained as such into the 1990s. He contended that, “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property,” and further:

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.[81]

The creation of Al-Qaeda was thus facilitated by the CIA and allied intelligence networks, the purpose of which was to maintain this “database” of Mujahideen to be used as intelligence assets to achieve US foreign policy objectives, throughout both the Cold War, and into the post-Cold War era of the ‘new world order’.

Part 2 of “The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda” takes the reader through an examination of the new imperial strategy laid out by American geopolitical strategists at the end of the Cold War, designed for America to maintain control over the world’s resources and prevent the rise of competitive powers. Covertly, the “database” (al-Qaeda) became central to this process, being used to advance imperial aims in various regions, such as in the dismantling of Yugoslavia. Part 2 further examines the exact nature of ‘al-Qaeda’, its origins, terms, training, arming, financing, and expansion. In particular, the roles of western intelligence agencies in the evolution and expansion of al-Qaeda is a central focus. Finally, an analysis of the preparations for the war in Afghanistan is undertaken to shed light on the geopolitical ambitions behind the conflict that has now been waging for nearly nine years.

* [Note on the research: For a comprehensive analysis of the history, origins and nature of al-Qaeda, see: Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America, which provided much of the research in the above article.]

Andrew Gavin Marshall is a Research Associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is co-editor, with Michel Chossudovsky, of the recent book, "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," available to order at Globalresearch.ca.

Notes

[1] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 62

[2] Ibid, page 63

[3] Ibid, page 62.

[4] Ibid, pages 66-67.

[5] HP-Time, The Crescent of Crisis. Time Magazine: January 15, 1979:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919995-1,00.html

[6] Peter Dale Scott, op. cit., page 67.

[7] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 171

[8] Manouchehr Ganji, Defying the Iranian Revolution: From a Minister to the Shah to a Leader of Resistance. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002: page 41

[9] Ibid, page 39.

[10] Ibid, page 41.

[11] Ibid.

[12] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 172

[13] Ibid, page 171.

[14] George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 796

[15] Ibid, page 797.

[16] Ibid, page 798.

[17] IPS, Q&A: Iran's Islamic Revolution Had Western Blessing. Inter-Press Service: July 26, 2008:

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43328

[18] Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

[19] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 89.

[20] George Lenczowski, The Arc of Crisis: It’s Central Sector. Foreign Affairs: Summer, 1979: page 810

[21] F. William Engdahl, op cit., page 172.

[22] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 81.

[23] Michael D. Evans, Father of the Iranian revolution. The Jerusalem Post: June 20, 2007:

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

[24] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 83.

[25] Ibid, page 84.

[26] Ibid, page 81.

[27] Ibid, pages 85-86.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid, page 87.

[30] Ibid, pages 88-89.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid, pages 87-88.

[33] Ibid, page 85.

[34] Ibid, page 86.

[35] Ibid, page 88.

[36] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 173

[37] Andrew Gavin Marshall, Controlling the Global Economy: Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Federal Reserve. Global Research: August 3, 2009:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14614

[38] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 89

[39] PBS, Secrets of His Life and Leadership: An Interview with Said K. Aburish. PBS Frontline:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/aburish.html

[40] Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279

[41] Oleg Kalugin, How We Invaded Afghanistan. Foreign Policy: December 11, 2009:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/11/how_we_invaded_afghanistan

[42] ‘'Le Nouvel Observateur' (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76: http://www.ucc.ie/acad/appsoc/tmp_store/mia/Library/history/afghanistan/archive/brzezinski/1998/interview.htm

[43] Ibid.

[44] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73

[45] Michael Parenti, Afghanistan, Another Untold Story. Global Research: December 4, 2008:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11279

[46] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 78.

[47] Ibid, page 116.

[48] Ibid, page 122.

[49] Ibid, page 123.

[50] Ibid,.

[51] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (Lawrence Hill Books: Chicago, 2003), pag.80

[52] Ibid, page 162.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid, pages 283-386.

[55] Ibid, page 466.

[56] Ibid, page 474.

[57] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: page 73

[58] Alfred W. McCoy, op cit., page 475.

[59] Peter Dale Scott, op cit., page 74.

[60] Ibid, pages 75-76.

[61] Ibid, page 124.

[62] Ibid, pages 75-76.

[63] Ibid, page 124.

[64] Carol Off, Back to school in Afghanistan. CBC: May 6, 2002:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/schools.html

[65] Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway, From U.S., the ABC's of Jihad. The Washington Post: March 23, 2002:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5339-2002Mar22?language=printer

[66] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Books, New York, 2004: Page 328

[67] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001. (London: Penguin, 2005), page 285

[68] Steve Coll, “Steve Coll” Interview with PBS Frontline. PBS Frontline: October 3, 2006:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/taliban/interviews/coll.html

[69] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), page 326

[70] ToI, “CIA worked in tandem with Pak to create Taliban”. The Times of India: March 7, 2001:

http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/taliban.htm

[71] Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005), pages 279-280

[72] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism. (London: André Deutsch Ltd, 1999), page 168

[73] Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost. MSNBC: August 24, 1998:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101/

[74] Veronique Maurus and Marc Rock, The Most Dreaded Man of the United States, Controlled a Long Time by the CIA. Le Monde Diplomatique: September 14, 2001: http://www.wanttoknow.info/010914lemonde

[75] Gerald Posner, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11. (New York: Random House, 2003), page 29

[76] Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens. (New York: Penguin, 2008), pages 7-9

[77] AP, Al Qaeda Financing Documents Turn Up in Bosnia Raid. Fox News: February 19, 2003:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,78937,00.html

[78] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press: 2007: pages 140-141

[79] Ibid, page 141.

[80] Robin Cook, The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means. The Guardian: July 8, 2005:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/08/july7.development

[81] Pierre-Henri Bunel, Al Qaeda -- the Database. Global Research: November 20, 2005:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUN20051120&articleId=1291

globalresearch.ca

[Len Colby]

The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis”

Andrew Gavin MARSHALL , 06.09.2010

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2010/09/06/the-imperial-anatomy-of-al-qaeda-the-cia-drug-running-terrorist.html

Concerns about the accuracy of Marshall's claims aside his "paper" is completely irrelevant to this discussion since no one has alleged AQ was involved, the 'official story' is that the brothers seem to have done this on their own.

[Len Colby]

Terror Acts in US: Who Gains? (I)

Olga SHEDROVA, Strategic Culture Foundation, 03.05.2013

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/05/03/terror-acts-in-us-who-gains-i.html

Yawn, obscure author (seemingly unemployed), obscure website, no citations and no coherent explanation as to how the USG/FoD etc. supposedly benefit from such attacks.

[Paul Rigby]

Hopelessly politically-incorrect: I enjoyed it immensely, and regard the entire satire as genuinely sage advice:

Don't be CIA's Next Patsy - 10 Preventative Steps

by Henry Makow, Ph.D.

http://henrymakow.com/2013/05/How-to-avoid-becoming-a-patsy.html

May 5, 2013

An increasingly common pitfall in modern life is finding that you have been blamed for a CIA false flag. These practical steps will help avoid this perilous predicament.

Modern life presents some unique challenges. STD's. Student loans. Banks seizing your accounts, etc. None is greater than the danger of becoming a patsy. This short article will help you avoid becoming the object of a massive, televised manhunt, and being butchered in the process.

You see, being a patsy means you cannot be arrested and tried in a Court of Law. You cannot be allowed to speak publicly. That would defeat the whole purpose of blaming you for something they did. They will pretend you died resisting arrest. That's when they will take a meat cleaver to your chest. (I should not be flippant here. Tamerlan was arrested alive and subsequently murdered by the police.)

Step Number One: Do not under any circumstances agree to participate in a "drill" designed to test precautions against "a terror attack."

No matter how much money they offer, or how much they appeal to your patriotic instincts, this is a "sorry, no-can-do." Also, wherever this "drill" is, make sure you are a hundred miles away.

Step Number Two: Convert to Judaism.

Patsies are never Jews. Your local synagogue will provide information on Talmud Torah classes.

Step Number Three: Patsies can be teenagers.

If you are a teenager, or even a child, do not assume you are safe. Babies can rest easy, for now.

Step Number Four: Question your gender.

Homosexuality also confers immunity against becoming a patsy. If you are still in school, join a "gay-straight alliance." They will help you with the conversion process.

Step Number Five: If you cannot become a Jew or homosexual, at least establish your liberal bona fides.

Let slip that you voted for Barack Obama, love Diane Feinstein, read the New York Times, and watch Jon Stewart and SNL religiously. Put a PBS bumpersticker on your car. Patsies are never liberals.

Step Number Six: Prepare a plan to follow in case they still make you the terrorist.

When the bullets are flying, saying "I'm a patsy" won't cut it. You will need a hideout that is better than a boat parked in the backyard.

Step Number Seven: There are cosmetic products that will help you lighten your complexion.

Avoid suntans. You should not be mistaken for a Muslim. Your life depends on it.

Step Number Eight: Make burial arrangements in advance.

When the public has been incited to believe you are the incarnation of evil, funeral directors will have a hard time accepting your business.

Step Number Nine - Study the lives of some of the great patsies in modern history.

Lee Harvey Oswald. Timothy McVeigh. Osama Bin Laden. James Holmes. Adam Lanza. What mistakes did they make that you can avoid? Certainly, one is getting involved with a CIA-FBI front group.

Step Number Ten- Avoid friendly strangers with deep pockets who offer to arrange foreign travel and adventure for you and your friends.

I welcome other suggestions from readers for sidestepping this common hazard. Anyone who believes the mass media accounts of these "terror attacks" is also a patsy, as are people who support the West's NWO-inspired aggression. Don't be one.

Related :

Are you a Terrorist? Take the Quiz!

10 Steps to Ensure Your Activist Group Has Not been Infiltrated

- See more at: http://henrymakow.com/2013/05/How-to-avoid-becoming-a-patsy.html#sthash.BFcBPm4g.dpuf

[Paul Rigby]

Uncle Ruslan Tsarni’s Organization May Have Funded Terrorists

by Joe Giambrone

May 3, 2013

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2013/05/03/uncle-ruslan-tsarnis-organization-may-have-funded-terrorists/

Why isn’t the Boston bombing suspects’ uncle Ruslan Tsarnaev/Tsarni considered a “person of interest” by the FBI? Or, heavens forbid, a “suspect” in the Boston Marathon bombing plot?

Is it because of his work with State Department and CIA connected USAID around the Caucasus region? Is it because he was formerly married to the daughter of a very high-ranking CIA official? Is it because this high-ranking CIA official, Graham E. Fuller, was deeply involved in “Islamic extremism,” for which he is a noted author and strategist? Or that Graham Fuller was CIA station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan? Could it be because his former father-in-law, Graham Fuller, “served 20 years in the Foreign Service, mostly the Muslim World, working in Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong. In 1982 he was appointed the National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South Asia at CIA, and in 1986 Vice-Chairman of the National Intelligence Council at CIA, with overall responsibility for all national level strategic forecasting.”

Could it be related to Fuller’s paper that launched the Iran/Contra activities? Or could it simply be Graham Fuller’s role in “strategic forecasting” both then and now?

Whatever the reasons, the Federal Bureau of Investigation should surely be interested in a little organization that Mr. Ruslan Tsarni set up in 1995 called the “Congress of Chechen International Organization.”

Why should FBI care about an old “Congress” of Chechen organizations? There are several reasons known so far, perhaps many more, to look into this group and its activities.

America’s Rottweiler, Daniel Hopsicker, has sunk his fangs into Ruslan Tsarnaev’s history, and he doesn’t appear to be letting go any time soon. Uncle Ruslan became the darling of the US press by immediately denouncing the two brothers as “losers” and even claiming that their brains were “stolen” by some radical Islamic cleric whom he had never met or spoken to.

But Uncle Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev’s work for USAID and his close connections to one of the top CIA strategists and a boastful expert on “Islamic extremism,” should cause us to take a very close look at his own actions. A quick search of USAID’s longtime ties to the CIA turns up this gem of a document, which once was “top secret,” but now declassified tells us:

Memorandum For: Deputy Director of Operations

Subject: Joint CIA/USAID Terrorist (Technical) Investigations Course #7 (English Language)…

1. This effort is a joint CIA/USAID training program for foreign police/security personnel…

This was dated March 7th of 1973 and is hosted right on the USAID website (at least at the time of writing).

Bloomberg told us that Ruslan Tsarni “was a legal consultant to a U.S. company contracted under USAID in a program of economic assistance for Kysrgyzstan.” Hopsicker exposed that Uncle Ruslan Tsarni is also a Halliburton connected oil man who profited generously from Kazakhstan’s oil fields.

Well, don’t the coincidences just keep piling up around this guy? Are we in the trillions to one range yet?

Two students from Kazakhstan were charged Wednesday morning for “destroying” evidence related to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, including fireworks without the gunpowder. Destroying evidence? Or planting? They don’t seem to have “destroyed” it very well.

What would motivate some “friends” to go and tamper with evidence on the biggest terrorism case since 9/11? This seems out of the ordinary activity, to say the least. A third man is also facing criminal charges in this evidence tampering and Obstruction of Justice.

Be that as it may, the US media has gone dark on Mr. Graham Fuller and his undeniable relationship with Mr. Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev. Not one corporate news outlet has covered this Hopsicker initiated piece despite it being incontrovertible. Fuller wrote about Ruslan in his memoir, Three Truths and a Lie. Not only does Mr. Fuller’s name link directly, by marriage, to the Tsarnaev clan, his home address links directly to a Chechen front organization used to funnel funds to named terrorists.

Here is where the plot coagulates. Hopsicker was not satisfied with a failed marriage. He went deeper. The Congress of Chechen International Organization assisted one Shaikh Fathi in 1996 by using a “charity” called Benevolence International to get “aid” to the Chechen freedom fighters. All fine and well, except for a couple of years later we have 9/11, and then American prosecutors like Patrick Fitzgerald begin turning over stones.

One of those slimy, moss covered stones leads to Shaikh Fathi. The Fitzgerald indictment reads: “Sheikh Fathi was a major conduit for providing material support to the Chechen rebels.” The indictment was against Benevolence International. That “charity” was shut down after the US Treasury Department determined that they were “financiers of terrorism.”

The document that Hopsicker acquired, on Congress of Chechen International Organization letterhead, is potentially the Achilles Heel of the entire covert war in Chechnya against the Russians. Beyond the Boston bombing, this exposes a Chechen front group created by the son in law of a top CIA official that used this same CIA official’s home address on the official application when Ruslan set up the front! This may be considered “poor tradecraft.” A bad decision in 1995 may have just exposed the entire CIA connected terrorism nexus to the world. And not one US “news” outlet will say one word about it.

Dozens of reporters gave open microphones to Ruslan Tsarni/Tsarnaev when he denounced his two nephews as “losers” and that he wished they had “never existed.” But what a contrast in news coverage now that this man Ruslan Tsarni himself is found to be very close to the Central Intelligence Agency, since 1995.

It seems as though the name “Graham Fuller” cannot be published in connection to this case, in any corporate media organization in the United States, nor in Europe. This is essentially Orwellian manipulation of the public, and should be considered the top censored news story of the year, and perhaps of the decade.

Another international terrorist threat warning concerned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, this time in 2012 from Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official told Daily Mail UK about a letter to US intelligence and that they wouldn’t even allow Tamerlan Tsarnaev to enter Saudi Arabia last December, 2012, for his desired pilgrimage to Mecca. The Saudi intelligence did not just repeat what Russia had said, and instead the warning was “based on human intelligence developed independently in Yemen.” Apparently the Saudi Foreign Minister and National Security Chief then met with Barack Obama in the Oval Office to discuss it early in 2013. Denied, denied, denied.

The usually reliable Israeli intelligence website DebkaFile suggested two things about this Boston Marathon bombing case that were not readily apparent at the time. These were 1) that the brothers (or older brother) were recruited by US intelligence, and that 2) they turned on their recruiters as double agents for Jihad.

The second part is speculative. But the first part suggests more detailed knowledge of the Tsarnaevs and of covert activities in the Caucasus. Most of the data concerning Uncle Ruslan were public and accessible, just waiting for someone like Hopsicker to piece it together. The freakish response of the FBI to Tamerlan Tsarnaev, despite international terrorist threat warnings, suggests something odd about this case. While double-agents are not unique and this has precedents, such as Ali Mohamad, we still have no proof that the brothers actually committed the bombings. They are being tried in the media, piece by piece, without legal recourse to challenge the accusations or the so-called evidence against them.

Russian news outlet Izvestia provides another piece of the puzzle, and it supports the Israeli claim that the brothers were recruited by US intelligence. On Tamerlan’s trip to Russia in 2012 (Jan. to July), there is a report by Georgian intelligence that Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended “training” at the Jamestown Foundation, connected with the Caucasus Fund. All have ties to CIA. As for Jamestown Foundation, guess who gave a keynote speech in 2008 there called “Turkey & the Caucasus after Georgia”?

Only your favorite “strategist,” the man whose name US media dare not speaketh. What a little tiny world we’ve inherited.

[Editor's note: A previous version of this article said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had entered Georgian territory and attended "training" at the Jamestown Foundation; however, Izvestia article from which this was sourced didn't say he entered Georgia, only that Georgian intelligence was aware of the training. The error has been corrected.]

[Len Colby]

Uncle Ruslan Tsarni’s Organization May Have Funded Terrorists

by Joe Giambrone

May 3, 2013

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2013/05/03/uncle-ruslan-tsarnis-organization-may-have-funded-terrorists/

Why isn’t the Boston bombing suspects’ uncle Ruslan Tsarnaev/Tsarni considered a “person of interest” by the FBI? Or, heavens forbid, a “suspect” in the Boston Marathon bombing plot?

Perhaps because there is currently zero public evidence of his involvement. We’ve already been over all this crap. And how does the author know if the FBI is investigating him or not?

It seems as though the name “Graham Fuller” cannot be published in connection to this case, in any corporate media organization in the United States, nor in Europe. This is essentially Orwellian manipulation of the public, and should be considered the top censored news story of the year, and perhaps of the decade.

LOL to a rational person the fact that his father-in-law from 1995 – 9, years before the brothers came to the US was a retired CIA official is an irrelevant factoid

[Paul Rigby]

The Tsarnaevs and the CIA–Part 2: Who is Brian Glyn Williams?

Traces of Reality

By Guillermo Jimenez, May 10, 2013

http://tracesofreality.com/2013/05/10/the-tsarnaevs-and-the-cia-part-2-who-is-brian-glyn-williams/

I’LL SEE YOUR GRAHAM FULLER AND RAISE YOU A BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS

The Tsarnaev family connections to the world of spooks and suits are becoming increasingly difficult to either ignore or dismiss as mere “coincidences.” When I wrote the first article on The Tsarnaevs and the CIA, detailing the connections between the Tsarnaev family (namely “Uncle Ruslan” Tsarni and Tamerlan Tsarnaev) to the intelligence world (Graham Fuller, Fethulla Gulen), I did not expect for it to become a multi-part series. Although, the way things are headed, there may indeed be a need for continuous entries within this journal.

A bit of old information has been made new again thanks to the keen eye of writer Mark Ames at NSFWCORP with a piece titled “I Hope I Didn’t Contribute To it,” which includes a detail that, as he correctly pointed out, has been completely overlooked.

THE PROJECT

Two years ago, while Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still a senior in high school, Dzhokhar was tasked with a project assignment by his English teacher, Steve Matteo. The project consisted of each student in the class researching their past, their history and ethnicity, and to write about their findings. Dzhokhar’s teacher, Steve Matteo, decided to help him along in his research by introducing him to his friend, Brian Glyn Williams, considered to be a “top expert” on Chechnya.

Williams, by all accounts, is indeed an expert on the subject, having majored in Russian Studies while an undergraduate, receiving dual Masters Degrees in Russian and East European History and Central Eurasian Studies, and a Doctorate Degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Central Asian History.

Furthermore, the breadth of knowledge he would have been able to bestow upon the younger of the two Tsarnaev brothers and accused Boston Bomber was not limited to simply that of scholarly research. Brian Glyn Williams is not just an academic with a pension for Russian studies and the Chechen struggle—he’s also a spook.

A CROSS BETWEEN JAMES BOND AND INDIANA JONES

Brian Glyn Williams’ history with The Central Intelligence Agency is not as well publicized as Spymaster Graham’s, indicating that perhaps he was not as involved with the CIA as Graham Fuller, who himself was a high level operative.

On the other hand, the flip side of that coin is also equally possible.

His book’s publisher confirms that Williams did indeed work for the CIA in at least some capacity:

“Having traveled extensively in the Pashtun tribal areas while working for the U.S. military and the CIA, Williams explores in detail of the new technology of airborne assassinations” [emphasis added].

His bio on the Huffington Post is a little more subtle:

“Brian Glyn Williams is a Professor of Islamic Studies at Univ of Mass. Dartmouth formerly of Univ. of London. He has spent four summers in Afghanistan researching terrorism and is the author of the forthcoming book Predators: The CIA’s Drone War on Al Qaeda based on his field work in Pakistan”.

“I’ve had a little criticism for providing him with information on Chechnya,” Williams says. “But that’s like criticizing someone for giving information to an Irish person about Ireland for fear that they might join the IRA. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Indeed, criticism for providing information on Chechnya to a young student working on a “special project” would not make any sense at all. What would make sense, however, would be criticism for not disclosing information as to the extent of his work with the league of extraordinary spies and assassins in the CIA—and for that matter, criticism of the mainstream press and the various writers and reporters who have been in touch with Williams in the last 3 weeks and never bothered to ask the question.

Williams says he never met Dzhokhar and only communicated with him briefly via email. As the HuffPo subscriber and former student mentioned above expressed, that idea is “surprising,” “shocking”—frankly, just plain hard to believe.

Brian Glyn Williams boasts that he is the only person in America, perhaps even the world, who teaches a course on the “obscure land” of Chechnya. He’s devoted the last nine years of his life to relaying his knowledge on the subject to students at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a young man of Chechen descent, keen on “rediscovering his identity,” as Williams says, transferred to UMASS-Dartmouth in the Fall of 2011, within months of the two exchanging emails.

But they never met? Dzhokhar made no further attempt to contact Williams even after establishing a rapport via email and now a student at the same University with the “only man in the world” who teaches a class on Chechnya?

Once again, just plain hard to believe. That being said, what reason do we have to suspect Williams would intentionally misrepresent their relationship—other than at some point in his life having worked for an agency many associate with professional liars and murderers?

That may not be much, I would concede—but then there’s that darn Jamestown Foundation again.

WORKSHOP FOR SPOOKS

Brian Glyn Williams not only performed work for the CIA, he is also an analyst for The Jamestown Foundation, an organization that has been described in the past as a CIA-front. If not a direct cover for the covert actions of the CIA, the Jamestown Foundation is certainly a place where spooks and suits like to hang out—give lectures, run workshops, influence an opinion here or there, destabilize a region of the world—the usual.

Williams’ association with the Jamestown Foundation is relevant for two principle reasons: First, it provides further insight as to the level of involvement Williams has had with the agency and, as a whole, the world of intelligence, think tanks and influence. Second, this isn’t the first time the Jamestown Foundation has come up with respect to the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Tsarnaevs.

Although the source is manifestly suspect, Russian state newspaper Izvestia has reported that the Counterintelligence Department of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs released information affirming Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended a workshop while visiting Dagestan in 2012 sponsored by the Caucuses Fund and the Jamestown Foundation.

A workshop of this sort, the Izvestia report proposes, would have been used as a tool by US intelligence (through their proxy in the Jamestown Foundation) to recruit residents of the Northern Caucuses (including Dagestan, home of the Tsarnaev family) to work in their interests. The implication, of course, being that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, having attended this workshop and fitting the recruitment profile, would have then been enlisted as an asset by the CIA.

DO THE MATH, SHOW YOUR WORK

The connection between Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the self-professed “world’s expert” in Chechen studies, agent of the CIA, and part-time analyst for the Jamestown Foundation is an unexpected one. Up to this point there has been very little to suggest Dzhokhar was as involved in the planning or execution of the bombing as his older brother Tamerlan (and to be fair, there has been no concrete evidence yet made available to the public that incriminates either one as the definitive culprit).

For curious journalists wanting additional information about Dzhokhar’s potentially more than merely “brief relationship” with Williams or his academic history in general at UMASS-Dartmouth through his education records: you’re out of luck, at least for the time being. His records have been sealed and both the University and The US Department of Education have denied requests to release them.

Within this context, the question of why Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was allowed to remain enrolled at UMASS-Dartmouth despite an “unusually” high unpaid balance of $20,000 becomes a bit more intriguing.

That being said, and as I’ve previously noted, the association between Dzhokhar and Brian Glyn Williams, as curious as it may be, would be easy enough to shake off as its own stand-alone piece of information.

Perhaps the same could even be said for any of other links in the Tsarnaev-CIA chain—in and of themselves.

Ruslan Tsarni (Tsarnaev), “Uncle Ruslan,” marrying the daughter of the former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence, Graham (RAND Corporation-Iran-Contra-Fethulla Gulen-Let’s use Islam to destabilize what remains of Russian power) Fuller.

Ruslan Tsarni contracted for work by, CIA front group, USAID between 1994 and 1996 (the same time of his marriage to Spymaster Graham’s daughter) and again in 2008.

Ruslan Tsarni founding the Congress of Chechen International Organizations, a group who “provided material support” to the Chechen rebels, out of Graham Fuller’s home.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev having reportedly attended a Jamestown Foundation-CIA sponsored workshop and potentially recruited as an asset.

Tamerlan’s widow, Katherine Russell, being the granddaughter of Richard Warren Russell, a graduate of Yale, likely member of the ultra-exclusive secret society Skull and Bones, and former U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence.

In and of themselves, these individual links may not mean much at all, but when placed in their proper context and summed up, the math cannot be denied—even if you don’t like the answers.

The Tsarnaevs are a “connected” family. That much has become abundantly clear. Exactly how they are connected, where their loyalties lie, to what extent, if any, were they actually involved in the planning or execution of the Boston Marathon Bombing, and for what ends—these are the larger questions whose answers may lead us to the truth behind the Tsarnaevs and the CIA.

Traces of Reality: Brian Glyn Williams - Another Link in the Tsarnaev-CIA Chain

[Len Colby]

The Tsarnaevs and the CIA–Part 2: Who is Brian Glyn Williams?

Traces of Reality

By Guillermo Jimenez, May 10, 2013

http://tracesofreality.com/2013/05/10/the-tsarnaevs-and-the-cia-part-2-who-is-brian-glyn-williams/

I’LL SEE YOUR GRAHAM FULLER AND RAISE YOU A BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS

[...]

Ouga-buga not only was Jahar's uncle briefly married to the daughter of an ex-CIA agent years before he and his brother came to the US he once exchanged a few e-mails with Williams – an expert on Chechnya, who once did work for the CIA – for a homework assignment! OMG! That just about proves the MIC/FoD were behind the attacks. The high school teacher who put them in touch must be 'in on it' as well! The author can't believe that Tsarnaev and Williams never met face to face because the former studied at the university where the other taught; but the younger Boston Bomber was “a major in marine biology...said that he hoped to become a dentist...did not talk to [his friends] about politics... got F’s in Principles of Modern Chemistry, Intro to American Politics and Chemistry and the Environment ...[and] a B in Critical Writing” i.e. we have evidence he took classes taught by Williams or displayed much of an interest with his homeland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_and_Tamerlan_Tsarnaev#University http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/details-of-tsarnaev-brothers-boston-suspects-emerge.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 There is also babble about William's involvement with the Jamestown Foundation and a claim without evidence it's tied to the CIA the author goes on about the claim elder brother Tamerlan went to one of their seminars but even he acknowledged “ the source is manifestly suspect”.

[Guest Tom Scully]

Len, you are quick on the trigger.

Is Williams calling Americans, "foreign fighers"? Why does he hate the U.S.?

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130420/NEWS/304200341

UMD professor: 'I hope I didn't contribute' April 20, 2013

.......

In Williams' view, Chechnya has an undeserved reputation as a hatchery of terrorists, including al-Qaida and the Taliban.

"Foreign fighters did come in and radicalized people," Williams said. For some, "they transformed the form of war from a national one to a full-blown terrorist jihad."...

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130419/NEWS/130419860&cid=sitesearch

UMD professor: 'I hope I didn't contribute'

April 19, 2013

Two years ago, UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Brian Glyn Williams communicated by email with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, then a 17-year-old student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School whose family fled the horrors of the Russian occupation in Chechnya.

[Paul Rigby]

Boston Bombing Suspects: FBI, Homeland Security withheld Information from Local, State Police, Congressional hearing confirms

By Barry Grey

Global Research, May 11, 2013

World Socialist Web Site

http://www.globalresearch.ca/boston-bombing-suspects-fbi-homeland-security-withheld-information-from-local-state-police/5334671

The Boston police commissioner and a top Massachusetts Homeland Security official told Congress Thursday that the local and state police were never informed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security of multiple warnings about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar are the only suspects to date in the twin bombings at the downtown Boston finish line of the race, which killed three people and wounded more than 160 others. Tamerlan was killed in a shootout with police on April 19. Dzhokhar is under arrest at a prison medical facility outside of Boston.

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said his department had been unaware that the Russian government contacted the FBI in 2011 to warn of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s radical jihadist sympathies and his plans to travel to the northern Caucasus and link up with Islamist separatist and terrorist elements from Dagestan and Chechnya. Nor had he been told, he said, that the FBI had questioned the elder Tsarnaev brother and his family, or that Tamerlan subsequently, in 2012, spent six months in the volatile region of southern Russia.

The FBI has acknowledged receiving the warning from Moscow and launching a probe of Tsarnaev, including an interrogation, but claims it found no “derogatory” information and closed the case. The Central Intelligence Agency has also acknowledged receiving a similar warning from Russia later in 2011. The government has also reported that it placed Tamerlan Tsarnaev on at least two anti-terror databases.

It has been widely reported that following his return from Russia, Tsarnaev posted jihadist videos on the Internet and was ejected from his mosque for making provocative anti-American statements.

There are also reports that the Russian internal security service gave the FBI a case file on Tsarnaev in November of 2012, after Tsarnaev’s return from Russia, outlining multiple contacts between the ethnic Chechen US resident and known members of the Islamist underground in Dagestan, which borders Chechnya.

On May 1, moreover, the British Daily Mail reported that Saudi Arabian officials sent a written report in 2012 to top US Homeland Security Department officials detailing their concerns about Tsarnaev and warning that he might be planning a terror attack.

Also testifying before the House committee on Thursday was Massachusetts Undersecretary for Homeland Security Kurt Schwartz, who said, “My understanding is that at no time prior to the bombings did any member of the Massachusetts State Police or the Fusion Center have any information or knowledge about the Tsarnaev brothers.”

The fusion center to which Schwartz referred was the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, one of 70 centers set up nationally in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to bring together federal, state and local law enforcement officials for the ostensible purpose of sharing and coordinating counterterrorism intelligence.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which is funded in part by the federal Department of Homeland Security, issued an 18-page report five days before the Boston bombing warning the Boston police that the finish line of the Marathon was an “area of increased vulnerability” and that “homegrown extremists” could use “small-scale bombings” to attack spectators and runners.

At the same time, the report said that “The FBI has not identified any specific lone offender or extremist group who pose a threat to the Boston Marathon.”

Local and state police are also included on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Boston, but there as well, they were not told of the multiple warnings about the Tsarnaevs or the federal government’s contact with the family. In his testimony, Police Commissioner Davis said that an officer of US Customs and Border Protection, a unit of the Homeland Security Department, who served on the task force and had knowledge of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s travels did not notify any of the four Boston police officers assigned to the group.

These statements by top local and state police officials rip to shreds the official attempts to explain away the failure of US police and intelligence agencies to prevent the April 15 bombings as yet another case of “failing to connect the dots” or “failing to communicate.” The identical lame phrases that were used after the 9/11 attacks to cover up the extensive advance warnings of a terror attack and the fact that both the FBI and CIA had been tracking many of the hijack-bombers are being employed once again.

There is no innocent explanation for a decision by the FBI, the CIA and the Homeland Security Department to conceal from the state and local police, in advance of a major public event, the presence of area residents widely suspected of having terrorist connections. To even suggest that such a decision would be made by these agencies out of civil liberties concerns is preposterous.

In an attempt to deflect blame, the FBI in Boston issued a statement Thursday evening declaring that state and local members of Joint Terrorism Task Forces “are responsible for maintaining awareness of possible threats to their respective jurisdictions.” The FBI office added that all task force members have access to Guardian, a system that collects information about alleged threats and suspicious activity.

The hearing itself, the first held by Congress on the bombings, was a transparent exercise in cover-up and damage control. Neither the Republican and Democratic congressmen nor the officials who testified evinced any desire to seriously investigate the role of intelligence and police agencies in the bombings.

There was no suggestion that the withholding of information could involve anything more sinister than incompetence or inattention. There was no questioning of the massive buildup of domestic spying and police powers since 9/11, supposedly to “protect” the American population and pursue a “war on terror,” nor any attempt to explain how, despite the panoply of Anti-Terror Task Forces and fusion centers, an evident terror threat could “drop below the radar.”

Nor was there any demand that those responsible for the supposed failures be named, fired or otherwise held accountable.

Police Commissioner Davis himself was the most open in expressing the general sentiments of those at the hearing. “I’m just very happy that we can move on to other things,” Davis said. “I’d personally like it if we never had to mention these names again.”

The committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (Republican of Texas), set the tone in his opening remarks, declaring, “We learned over a decade ago the danger of failing to connect the dots.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, hinted that more extensive and integrated domestic spying was needed, stating, “We must develop a way to fix and integrate these various databases.”

Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic senator and the party’s 2000 vice presidential candidate, was more direct in seeking to utilize the Boston bombings as a pretext for intensifying the assault on democratic rights. He suggested that Justice Department guidelines were handcuffing the FBI in conducting investigations, and that the guidelines should be loosened to give the FBI more leeway.

The official story—that the police and intelligence agencies once again “failed to connect the dots” and share what they knew about the alleged bombers—lacks any credibility. More plausible is the likelihood that US intelligence agencies were using, or planned to use, Tamerlan Tsarnaev to further their machinations with Islamist separatist forces in Chechnya and Dagestan, with whom they have been working for many years.

The US has worked with such elements to pursue their geo-political aims in the region against Russia, as well as mobilizing them to participate in US-backed wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and more recently in Libya and Syria. US proxy forces from the Caucasus include those that are linked to Al Qaeda.

The bipartisan cover-up reflected at the hearing was not only about state conspiracies and intrigues against democratic rights at home, but also about their connection to US aggression and subversion abroad. The most immediate task was to conceal the de facto alliance of the US and Al Qaeda-associated terrorist forces, including those originating in Chechnya and neighboring Muslim-majority Russian Republics. The reality of this political and military alignment explodes the myth of a so-called “war on terror” being fought to defeat Al Qaeda.

Thus, McCaul declared: “Many Chechen rebels have forged a bond with the Al Qaeda jihadist movement. These lethal warriors have fought side-by-side with Al Qaeda and the Taliban against US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

He conveniently neglected to mention that these same forces have been armed and supported by the US in Libya and Syria.