PAKISTAN’S KALASHNIKOV CULTURE AND THE CIA-ISI-SAUDI AXIS

Saudi Entrepreneur Adnan Khashoggi

Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XX: PAKISTAN’S KALASHNIKOV CULTURE AND THE CIA-ISI-SAUDI AXIS

By Alex Constantine

While a fugitive in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef was instrumental in several bombings and a plot to kill Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister. Today, Mrs. Bhutto chairs the Pakistan People’s Party, founded in 1967 by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In July 1977, Mr. Bhutto was unseated as prime minister himself in a CIA-planned coup led by General Mohammed Zia Al-Haq. Benazir has long experience with the political intrigues of the Pakistani contras: “As a moderate, progressive, democratically-elected woman prime minister of Pakistan,” Mrs. Bhutto said in a 2001 interview, “I was a threat to the fundamentalist zealots on multiple levels and targeted by them.” The zealots, of course, had a distinct advantage: “The support of sympathetic elements within Pakistan's security apparatus and the financial support of people like Osama Bin Laden.”

Bhutto had shut down an al Qaeda-affiliated university in Peshawar, and that brought retaliation - “My government was destabilized,” she says; Ramzi Yousef had been caught, extradited and “money was pilfered and laundered from state banks to fund the campaigns of opposition parties.” The interrogation of Yousef revealed “two separate assassination attempts in 1993. Osama bin Laden personally spent over million in late 1989 in support of a motion of no confidence to topple my government. And ultimately, with the active support of elements of the Pakistani military, my two democratically elected governments were sacked and elections rigged to ensure that my party would not return to power. Beware the power of zealots who are well-funded, well-armed and supported by elements of your own government!”1

Yousef was arrested at the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad on February 7, 1995 by Pakistani police, agents of the FBI and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service.

In November, Bhutto was dismissed as “paranoid” by clerical opponents when she condemned the intrusion of religion into politics, and spoke in favor of a liberal democratic state. She also denounced the irrelevant, bomb-throwing fundamentalists agitating for her removal as “western agents" financed “by the CIA."2

Bhutto takes a dim view of the current administration under Pervez Musharraf. In a recent Guardian editorial, she saw that in Bush’s war or terror, Musharraf “gets to play good cop and earn Washington's pleasure to continue his dictatorship.” Unfortunately, “eyebrows are raised as to why leading al Qaeda militants found it necessary to hide” - and continue to operate, like Yousef and Murad and Atta - “in a land run by Washington's ‘key ally’ in the war against terror.”3

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US CENTCOM CHIEF MEETS MUSHARRAF

Islamabad, Oct 6, 2003, IRNA - ... Pakistan is a close ally of the United States in the war against al-Qaeda ... and US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has praised Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States ...

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American news outlets have been all too willing to distort the Islamic threat and report dubious federal pronouncements without question. At the same time, U.S. involvement in terrorism, particularly the “conservative” variety, is downplayed.

The bonds between the CIA, according to Australian reporter Ben Vidgen, “anti-Communist elements of the Vatican and Hitler's men are not slim. Since the final days of World War II, the totalitarian seekers have made use of people's hatred by establishing a clandestine fascist network.” The said network would, of course, include “government-endorsed death squads” prowling the countryside like the Black Reichswehr of proto-Nazi Germany ... or the Nicaraguan contras.

Pakistan’s faith-based death squads “possess the financial, logistical and political support of agents whose influence equals or betters the ruling system's power. The above is a premise wholeheartedly agreed with by the US-based right-wing Center for International Affairs (a favourite stomping ground of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski). The Center for International Affairs (and its close cousin, the Center for Strategic and International Studies) utilised this hypothesis to promote the perception that the Soviet Union lay behind all incidents of international terrorism. Their prestige and influence was so great that when the CIA's own analysts could not find verifiable proof of a Soviet terrorist conspiracy, the CIA director, William Casey, chose to rely on the information of journalist Claire Sterling in her book, The Terror Network. ‘Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid .95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay ,000 a year,’ responded Casey in fury. The irony was that Claire Sterling's book had used material that was in fact part of a CIA propaganda scheme.”4

In November 2001, members of a militant group calling itself Mohammed's Army hijacked a bus in Pakistan after the driver ignored a demand to turn off the muzak. Police caught up with them and seized firearms, grenades, a variety of arms ... and weapons permits issued by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency.5

“Since its founding in 1948,” the Baltimore Sun reports, “the ISI has grown into a giant intelligence and covert operations network with an estimated 10,000 employees - an ‘invisible government,’ some say - that wields considerable influence over Pakistani foreign policy and sometimes meddles in domestic politics.”6

It is well-known that the ISI was a CIA cut-out in the arming of Afghan guerillas, and that BCCI laundered opium profits for the war. (Dozens of al Qaeda histories and timelines on the Internet weave the Byzantine maze of Bush administration, CIA and bin Laden connections to BCCI, so the banking network won’t be discussed in this account unless necessary.)

There are critical, even shocking gaps in the files among those kept between 1982 through 1992. Not all is known about the CIA-BCCI scandal or some of principal contacts in the Middle East, including BCCI shareholder Kamal Adham and a favored client, Adnan Khashoggi. However, as The New Yorker reported on March 17, 2003, when Khashoggi embargoed missiles to Iran on behalf of North’s NSC, he “borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.”

Investigations of Adnan Khashoggi have cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars - and they always come up dry due to backstage intrigues.

But there is a substantial record of Bush ties to the ISI and bin Laden. The bin Ladens and their Saudi business partners owned Texas property banks, airlines. Intensive lobbying efforts, Wayne Madsen reports, “carried out with the help of Texans like Houston socialite and TV personality Joanne Herring, Baron and Baroness di Portanova, and Vice President George H. W. Bush, in concert with Richard Perle, former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, the Congressional Jewish Caucus, and the ever-enigmatic shady operator Richard Armitage, radicals like bin Laden and his associates, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri and Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (the founder of a Saudi-financed and ISI-organized ‘Terrorist University’ which spawned the Philippine terrorist ‘Abu Sayyaf Group’), were able to cobble together an impressive jihadist army armed with stockpiles of Soviet-made weapons from Egypt, captured Soviet weapons from Israel, and tons of cash from billionaire Saudi benefactors. George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush's Florida election ‘fixer’ and newly-named Bush debate coach James Baker III have both been honored guests, according to The Wall Street Journal, at the bin Laden family's palatial headquarters in Jeddah. With the active support of Pakistan's military dictator Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq (who was killed along with the U.S. ambassador, Pakistan's ISI chief Akhtar Abdul Rahman, and others in a mysterious 1988 plane crash determined by an unpublished Pakistani court of inquiry report to have been caused by the pilot being knocked out by gas in the cockpit), the Afghan mujaheddin became increasingly radicalized in the Wahhabi traditions.”7

Saudi Royals furnished the madrasas, and Pakistan’s ISI whipped them into fundamentalist soldiers for Allah (and the CIA).

[TO BE CONTINUED]

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NOTES

1) “A Former Pakistani Prime Minister Weighs In:

Benazir Bhutto,” Slate.com, Sept. 21, 2001.

http://slate.msn.com/id/1008335/

2) “Bhutto's paranoid accusations,” Independent Center for Strategic Studies and Analysis.

http://icssa.org/ICSS%20-%20theme_secularism_Bhuttos_paranoid.htm

3) Benazir Bhutto, “Dictatorship and religious extremism are fuelled by gross inequality,” Guardian, August 9, 2004.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,1279225,00.html

4) Ben C. Vidgen, “A State of Terror: How many 'terrorist' groups has your government established, sponsored or networked lately?” Nexus, February-March 1996.

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/terror.html

5) Frank Langfitt, “Pakistani spies long linked to militants - Agency gave backing to Taliban, Kashmir fighters, mujahedeen,” Baltimore Sun, November 25, 2001.

6) Ibid.

7) Wayne Madsen, “Osama bin Laden: a Texas-style Republican in Muslim clothing,” Online Journal, September 12, 2004.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/091204Madsen/091204madsen.html