This year marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains by the Bolivian military, led by the CIA. Although imprisoned, keeping Che Guevara alive in those days of October, 1967, was a temerity for imperialism even more so in a context where they were just starting to implement their new plans for counterinsurgency and national security that resulted in military coups and military dictatorships in virtually all Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

The figure of Che Guevara has always been very controversial. Hated by the right-wing and by reactionary forces across the continent. And controversial, even among the progressive and left-wing sectors.

In those years, the left was very dogmatized, and with each thesis, a new group was formed. Each group labeled Che according to their manuals, and some classified him only as an adventurer, an idealist. After all, it was more convenient to follow the bureaucratic and peaceful tradition of some parties that defined themselves as communists. There were those who were frightened by his practice. After all, it was too much to ask of a common militant to follow such boldness. And others even misrepresented his ideas, turning his example into a mere stimulus to a false heroism unrelated to the masses, which was summed up in the thesis of Régis Debray, who argued that “it was enough that a small group of well-armed and willing men, to climb the mountains and create the focus for the exploited masses to follow them. ” It was “foquismo.”

These were definitely not Che’s ideas, not even about the military strategy of taking power. And even in his “Guerilla Warfare” manual, written from his concrete experience in the Cuban revolution, the principles of guerrilla warfare are only present as part of the mass struggle as a means, not an end in itself. In it, he also discusses the need of the various subjective, objective conditions and the correlation of forces, for its triggering.

But, being that Che was so controversial and so misunderstood regarding strategy and tactics, and having been victorious in Cuba but defeated in Congo and Bolivia, what would Che’s legacy be?

One cannot idealize Che’s image as if he were a super human. Nor dogmatize him as a single and absolute example. Nor exorcise it, reducing him to a myth. Che represents the synthesis of a revolutionary historical period of our continent. His ideas, his ideals, and his practice formed the symbolism of the feelings and the practice of a whole revolutionary movement, of various popular organizations in Cuba and throughout Latin America.

Therefore, when referring to it, it must be borne in mind that he has become a political reference because he represents a synthesis of the historical experience of various Latin American peoples.

And perhaps his figure was as strong as a synthesis, because, as historians and contemporaries say, Che was one of the few revolutionaries who managed to live intensely, coherently and daily, everything he thought.

“My father, – said Aleidita in a statement -, “sought to live every day coherently with what he thought.”

And it is in this consistent, everyday practice that one finds Che’s greatest legacy for the present generation of idealists and revolutionaries.

Briefly, one can identify ten great values that would represent Che’s legacy in the history of Latin America.

1. Humanism
Man should be the main objective.

Your well-being, your self-improvement as a being that seeks to perfect itself, that seeks happiness, that seeks to live in a just society. The struggle, the party, the guerrilla, are always interpreted by Che as means. The aim is to achieve a society of free and fraternal men. That is why, even after taking power, in Cuba’s case, there was an endless struggle for the construction of a different society. In this Guevarian humanism, Marx’s ideals are deepened, and the more generous view of the main objective of a social revolution is restored. Contrary to the practice of some leftist parties, which have transformed the conquest of power, the control of the state and the strengthening of its organization in an end in itself.

This humanism is also present when he defends the idea that what makes a person a “true revolutionary” is when that person moves permanently by a deep feeling of love for his peers.

2. Rebelling Against any Social Injustice
This phrase has become a principle of practice for any revolutionary. Che argued that the practice of any person claiming to be revolutionary should be enough indignation to rebel against any social injustice felt against any human being anywhere in the world or under any circumstances.

In this principle, the fundamental idea of ​​social relations conceived by Che is present. The sense of equality and justice. And, at the same time, the rebellion and the courage to encourage all individuals to seek equality, rebelling against any situation of injustice. This view breaks the individualistic conception of caring only about oneself or one’s friends. And it breaks with the illusion that to be revolutionary, it is necessary to have theory, to be in a revolutionary organization. Take pride in dogmas and symbols and forget about everyday practice, where, at any moment and in small things, one can be a great revolutionary as we fight against these injustices. Against these situations of oppression that classist societies and capitalism produce.

3. Latin-Americanism
The idea of ​​the Latin American identity of the peoples who inhabit this continent, despite the cultural and ethnic differences, have been present since the struggles for independence. Quite often Simon Bolivar is mentioned, and especially Jose Marti. These ideals are present in many literary works, in political speeches and party programs, in all the countries of the continent. But surely, Che’s figure was the bluntest expression of this character, by his life example.

History reserved for him the opportunity to be born in Argentina, to have traveled the continent by land and to have gotten to know its illnesses more closely. To fall in love with the cause of all the Latin American peoples. Thus, he was able to devote himself with the same passion in Guatemala, in the preparation of the Granma, in Mexico, in the mountains of Cuba. In the revolutionary government, on the UN platform, and on the Bolivian highlands.

His life put into practice the ideas of Martí. And it consolidated this Latin American spirit. Because it has contributed to the understanding that the causes of the people’s social problems in different countries are the same. That the imperialist role of the United States oppresses all. And that the solution, in the long run, will unite all in a similar, Latin American path. An isolated country won’t be able to build a just and fraternal society in Latin America by itself. Even in the case of the victory of the Cuban revolution, one should note the sacrifices imposed on the Cuban people by the North American siege and the recent infeasibility of other revolutions in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.

4. The Missionary Spirit
The missionary spirit present in Che’s ideas and practice is based on the feeling of solidarity, not adventure. Che used to say that “the most beautiful quality of a person is the feeling of solidarity.” And it was with this feeling that he preached the missionary spirit. Get rid of everyday tasks, of the easiness of organized life. And be willing to give up this easiness and go to other places, other villages, and even other countries. Contribute in some way, with humility, so that other people can live better. This missionary spirit took him to many places. But always with the same feeling of solidarity. Never to teach, to give orders, to impose. Or take some personal advantage.

This feeling of solidarity is what has stimulated thousands of Cuban revolutionaries to contribute with their knowledge, with their goodwill, in the field of healthcare, of techniques, with other peoples, in almost every continent.

5. The Spirit of Sacrifice
The spirit of sacrifice was not a moralistic, false, or religious discourse, to seek paradise in eternal life. Not a masochistic deviation. But it was part of life. The worst task, in any job or mission, was assumed by Che. And he preached that every militant, that every revolutionary should assume this obligation for himself. With these values, one would have enough morality to serve as an example to the all of the people and the construction of a different society.

6. The Example of Work
Work has always been seen by Che as the transforming force of men, as the basis for building all wealth in society. But above theoretical and philosophical concepts, his legacy is to have practiced the basic idea that “no one can ask another to do something without doing it first.”

That’s why, on many occasions, he was the first to do the tasks, the first to start doing the job. First, he tried to do it himself, and just then he would ask if others could also do it and move on.

This spirit is present in Che’s enormous contribution to the organization of mass work, in the form of task-forces, where the entire adult population was called to engage.

This same spirit was present in the political planning and in the debates with Cuban workers and Cuban society in the process of building socialism. It shows that a more just society, with better well-being, is not built with discourses, or only ideals, but that it depended, fundamentally, on the increase in the production of goods, of commodities, of wealth. And that would only be possible with much work. That is, a more advanced and more just society would only be achieved with more work from the present generation, to build a more dignified future for future generations.

7. The Dispossession of Material Goods
Che held the most important positions in the Cuban state. He was Minister, President of the Central Bank, took part in countless international delegations representing the Government and the Cuban people. He could have settled in the positions and the quiet life that his trajectory assured him.

When he said goodbye to his children, he was careful to point out that he left them no material goods, and hoped that the revolutionary state would guarantee them the same welfare and education that it should guarantee to all the children of the people.
His habits were simple and modest. Almost Franciscan.

And this spirit of the person that does not cling to material goods as if they were the only source of happiness, was present in his preaching.

It counteracted the need of man to have access to knowledge, cultural goods, education and a life of solidarity and equality as the basis of happiness. Goods related to the basic needs of man are fundamental. But the practice of individualism, of selfishness, of the accumulation of goods as ostentation of social differentiation would undermine morality needed for the construction of a more just society.

This principle is also based on the practice stimulated by Che, of voluntary work. He saw in voluntary work, carried out in the time off, on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, a way of practicing this detachment for material things, and the way of practicing concrete acts of social solidarity. He also believed that the great concrete problems of Cuban society would only be possible to resolve more quickly if there were a donation, a greater surrender of all in the carrying out of voluntary unpaid work.

8. Belief in the Power of the Masses
The popular force and transformative capacity of the organized masses are present in every political thought of Che. Even in the theorizing of military strategies, contrary to the diffusion “foquismo,” Che preached that the revolutionary victory would only be possible if he could organize a true popular army, of the whole people.

The deviations of putchtism or the heroism of a small group that could free the people were never present in his ideas.

This same conception is present by allying the force of the masses with the spirit of sacrifice and voluntary work. And so, many efforts were made to solve concrete problems of the population. From public cleaning, the construction of popular housing, to the cutting of sugarcane and the defense of the motherland, when Cuba, for example, was invaded by military forces organized by the United States in the famous episode of the Bay of Pigs, and in 72 hours, with the mobilization of all the people in arms, managed to defeat and arrest all the invaders.

9. The Relationship of Leaders x Masses
The daily practice of Che’s example also brings an important legacy as to how he related to the masses. He defended and practiced the necessary bonding of the leaders with the masses. He was always among them. And he tried to listen to their yearnings, problems, difficulties, and criticisms of the revolutionary process.

He had an essentially anti-bureaucratic, anti-cabinet, anti-avant-garde, anti-director practice. Avoiding and fighting that an organized core of the party could know everything about the people and choose the best way for it. Being always in the midst of the people was the best way to make fewer mistakes.

10. The Education of Cadres
The experience of building socialism, the experience of the people’s administration of a revolutionary state under conditions of underdevelopment, led Che to devote much thought to the need for the education of cadres. There are many reflections recorded in speeches, articles, essays, on this issue. He saw the need to educate cadres as vital for the revolutionary process. And again, it manifests its connection with the popular force, in defending the idea that a policy of cadres was a policy necessarily directed at the masses. So that the masses, especially the youth, could form as many people as possible as revolutionary militants, within the technical and political needs. But, above all, that with a political, moral and cultural development, they represented the practice of values of the new man that would serve as an example to the whole mass.

He argued that the cadres should be highly disciplined. Technically prepared, with a passion for the study and scientific knowledge. Willing to tackle any task. With capacity to analyze the problems and their causes, and with enough creativity to seek a solution. But, above all, he should earn respect for the workers and the people, for his example and his affection and dedication to his peers.

In this way, people would become examples, and by way of example, they could be called revolutionary cadres.

Conclusion
The figure of Che Guevara is still so present in our midst, fundamentally because of the legacy that he left us. The living situation of the peoples of Latin America has not changed. The productive forces developed. But the social and concrete problems of our people continue.

It is up to the popular organizations that claim to be revolutionary to reflect on this legacy. Look for the universality that exists in it, regardless of the social category, the environment or the country in which it operates.

Believing in Che’s legacy does not mean to copy strategies or tactics of power grab used in Cuba or Bolivia. Each country, each people, each situation will have its own strategy and tactics, determined by objective, subjective conditions and by the correlation of forces. To believe in Che is, above all, to feed the possibility of revolution permanently. To make the revolution every day. By our practice, by the permanent encouragement of the trust in our ideals, and by the certainty that it is possible to defeat the oppressors (internal and external) and that one day we will build a more just and fraternal society. And certainly, as Martí and Che Guevara dreamed, Latin American.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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Aadhar Data is available to USA’s infamous CIA and therefore much more than privacy, India’s soveregnity stands compromised.

Today, August 24, WikiLeaks published secret documents from the ExpressLane project of the CIA. These documents reveal details of one of the cyber operations the CIA conducts against liaison services — which includes among many others the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

According to Wikileaks, the OTS (Office of Technical Services), a branch within the CIA, has a biometric collection system that is provided to liaison services around the world — with the expectation for sharing of the biometric takes collected on the systems. But this ‘voluntary sharing’ obviously does not work or is considered insufficient by the CIA, because ExpressLane is a covert information collection tool that is used by the CIA to secretly exfiltrate data collections from such systems provided to liaison services.

ExpressLane is installed and run with the cover of upgrading the biometric software by OTS agents that visit the liaison sites. Liaison officers overseeing this procedure will remain unsuspicious, as the data exfiltration disguises behind a Windows installation splash screen.The core components of the OTS system are based on products from Cross Match, a US company specializing in biometric software for law enforcement and the Intelligence Community. The company hit the headlines in 2011 when it was reported that the US military used a Cross Match product to identify Osama bin Laden during the assassination operation in Pakistan.

So is the Indian government by insisting on Aadhar compromising India’s core sovereignity?

The core components of the OTS system are based on products from Cross Match, a US company specializing in biometric software for law enforcement and the Intelligence Community. The company hit the headlines in 2011 when it was reported that the US military used a Cross Match product to identify Osama bin Laden during the assassination operation in Pakistan.

Cross Match certified by UIDAI

Cross Match was one of the first suppliers of biometric devices certified by UIDAI for Aadhaar program. The company received the Certificate of Approval from the Indian Government in 2011. Cross Match received the Certificate of Approval for its Guardian fingerprint capture device and the I SCAN dual iris capture device on October 7, 2011. Both systems utilize Cross Match’s patented Auto Capture feature, which quickly captures high-quality images with minimal operator involvement.

The Certificate of Approval, was issued after completion of all tests required to demonstrate compliance with the quality requirements of UIDAI. The certification body consists of the Standardization, Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) Directorate for the Government of India’s Department of Information Technology (DIT) and the UIDAI. The tests performed by the STQC included the following criteria: Physical & Dimensional, Image Quality, Environmental (Durability/Climatic), Safety, EMI/EMC, Security, Functional, Performance, Interoperability, Ease of Use & Ergonomics.

Majority of the UIDAI certified enrollment agencies use Cross Match devices across India. Cross Match was also the first company to receive the Provisional Certificate for use in the UID program in September, 2010. Video featuring the Cross Match Guardian and I SCAN devices has been taken down from the official UIDAI website.

Francisco Partners

In 2012, Francisco Partners acquired Cross Match Technologies Inc. The company has more than 5,000 customers worldwide and over 250,000 products deployed in over 80 countries. Cross Match’s customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. State Department and various state and local governments; as well as numerous foreign governments and law enforcement agencies. It also provides biometric solutions to customers in transportation, critical infrastructure, financial services, education, and healthcare sectors.
One of Francisco Partners portfolio company is an Israeli cyber weapons dealer called NSO Group. The company’s Pegasus iOS malware was linked to attacks on iPhones of a prominent UAE activist and a Mexican journalist.

Researchers from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and mobile security firm Lookout raised questions about the ethics of NSO Group, a government spyware provider founded by an alum of Israel’s vaunted intelligence agencies. Francisco Partners bought its stake in the company for $120 million in 2014. Citizen Lab uncovered NSO’s Pegasus malware targeting iPhones of a Mexican journalist and a UAE activist. The same day, FORBES reported that Francisco Partners added Circles to its roster of investments, another Israeli-founded surveillance firm, which sold contentious gear to hack a part of global telecoms networks, known as SS7. That cost the private equity firm $130 million, a source close to the deal told FORBES.

Spying on Governments, Activists & Journalists

Francisco Partners also ran Turkey’s spy operations by selling its deep packet inspection product for surveillance. Deep packet inspection enables surveillance at the outset. Its very purpose is to open up “packets” of data flying across networks and inspect them to check if they should pass. DPI has made headlines for controversial use cases. China, for instance, likes to use DPI in its infamous censorship and surveillance systems. Sunnyvale, California-based Blue Coat Systems, in which Francisco Partners was a significant investor, saw its DPI technology censoring the internet in Syria in 2011, just as the civil war was erupting. Human rights activists looked on agog, but Blue Coat later said resellers were to blame and that it had not given permission for the technology to be shipped to the country. One reseller was later slapped with a maximum fine of $2.8 million by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). (Francisco Partners also has stakes in Barracuda Networks and Dell Software, which both ship DPI products).

Aadhaar’s biometric pioneer

The foundation of the Aadhaar program is based on biometric and demographic data that is unique to each citizen. This data can only be collected by leveraging biometric devices and compatible software – the second and third stages of the Aadhaar value chain.

Cross Match’s Indian partner for the UID program is Smart Identity Devices Pvt. Ltd. (Smart ID). Smart Identity Devices, or Smart ID, has been the biometric pioneer and leader for the Aadhaar program. Smart ID provides biometric technology, smart card, and information and communication technology products and services for numerous sectors, such as financial services, logistics, government, and IT security. Launching commercial operations in 2008, Smart ID is based in Noida, India and is led by Sanjeev Mathur. The company’s devices are being used by enrollment agencies across India for the Aadhaar program.
 

According to a recent study by Research and Markets, India’s biometrics market is forecast to hit about $2 billion by 2018.

Smart ID’s products and services range from biometric products, to mobile application solutions, to services such as Aadhaar enrollment, training, project management, IT hosting, and business correspondent management. As of 2014, Smart ID was able to carry out enrollment activities across India in states such as, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, West Bangal, and Madhya Pradesh. Smart ID has already enrolled more than 1.2 million citizens into the Aadhaar program through its enrollment agencies. In July 2011, the UIDAI recognized Smart ID as being one of the three best enrollment agencies in Aadhaar for enrolling more than 25 million citizens in a very short time frame.
The price of a Smart ID Patrol ID fingerprint scanner was approximately $2300 in 2014. And these devices were installed across the country. It would be interesting to know how much did the Indian government pay this CIA front company for the exercise. Lets say UIDAI installed 10,000 such bugged CIA devices across the country for enrollment (which is a very conservative estimate), the staggering cost would be 1473554800 Rs.

How CIA agents can access Aadhaar database in Real-time

A number of the CIA’s electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity. These attack methods are able to penetrate high security networks that are disconnected from the internet, such as police record database. In these cases, a CIA officer, agent or allied intelligence officer acting under instructions, physically infiltrates the targeted workplace. The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose, which is inserted into the targeted computer. The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media. For example, the CIA attack system Fine Dining, provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use. To witnesses, the spy appears to be running a program showing videos (e.g VLC), presenting slides (Prezi), playing a computer game (Breakout2, 2048) or even running a fake virus scanner (Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos). But while the decoy application is on the screen, the underlaying system is automatically infected and ransacked.

Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency’s OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically “exfiltrating” information from computer systems) for specific operations. The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate this to CIA malware configuration staff. The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff.

Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals. The ‘Case Officer’ is also asked to specify the environment of the target like the type of computer, operating system used, Internet connectivity and installed anti-virus utilities (PSPs) as well as a list of file types to be exfiltrated like Office documents, audio, video, images or custom file types. The ‘menu’ also asks for information if recurring access to the target is possible and how long unobserved access to the computer can be maintained. This information is used by the CIA’s ‘JQJIMPROVISE’ software to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation.

Here is the official training manual that contains the detailed steps for carrying out the installation and configuration of Cross Match for the Aadhaar Enrolment Client. This manual also describes the process of importing master data after downloading it from the UIDAI Admin Portal.

It is remarkable that Aadhaar and Al-Qaeda mean the same thing, which is “foundation” – Manu Joseph pointed out this tweetable fact in his piece on Live Mint. What we might add is that it is also remarkable that both Aadhaar and Al Qaeda are illegitimate sons of the same mother!

By ararngement with GGI News

Related Stories:

1. India among top targets of spying by NSA
2. CIA Activities in India

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A political failure outstripped by history

A middle-aged nonentity, a political failure outstripped by history – by the millions of Arabs demanding freedom and democracy in the Middle East – died in Pakistan yesterday (May 2). And then the world went mad.

Fresh from providing us with a copy of his birth certificate, the American president turned up in the middle of the night to provide us with a live-time death certificate for Osama bin Laden, killed in a town named after a major in the army of the old British empire. A single shot to the head, we were told. But the body’s secret flight to Afghanistan, an equally secret burial at sea? The weird and creepy disposal of the body – no shrines, please – was almost as creepy as the man and his vicious organisation.

The Americans were drunk with joy. David Cameron thought it “a massive step forward”. India described it as a “victorious milestone”. “A resounding triumph,” Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu boasted. But after 3,000 American dead on 9/11, countless more in the Middle East, up to half a million Muslims dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 years trying to find bin Laden, pray let us have no more “resounding triumphs”. Revenge attacks? Perhaps they will come, by the little groupuscules in the West, who have no direct contact with al-Qaeda. Be sure, someone is already dreaming up a “Brigade of the Martyr Osama bin Laden”. Maybe in Afghanistan, among the Taliban.

But the mass revolutions in the Arab world over the past four months mean that al-Qaeda was already politically dead. Bin Laden told the world – indeed he told me personally – that he wanted to destroy the pro-western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic caliphate. But these past few months millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched those revolutions unfold this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

In his own eyes, his achievement was the creation of al-Qaeda, the institution which had no card-carrying membership. You just woke up in the morning, wanted to be in al-Qaeda – and you were. He was the founder. But he was never a hands-on warrior. There was no computer in his cave, no phone calls to set bombs off. While the Arab dictators ruled uncontested with our support, they largely avoided condemning American policy; only bin Laden said these things. Arabs never wanted to fly planes into tall buildings but they did admire a man who said what they wanted to say. But now, increasingly, they can say these things. They don’t need bin Laden. He had become a nonentity.

But talking of caves, bin Laden’s demise does bring Pakistan into grim focus. For months President Ali Zardari has been telling us that bin Laden was living in a cave in Afghanistan. Now it turns out he was living in a mansion in Pakistan. Betrayed? Of course he was. By the Pakistan military or the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)? Quite possibly both. Pakistan knew where he was.

Not only was Abbottabad the home of the country’s military college – the town was founded by Major James Abbott of the British army in 1853 – but it is the headquarters of Pakistan’s Northern Army Corps’ Second Division. Scarcely a year ago I sought an interview with another “most wanted man” – the leader of the group believed to be responsible for the Mumbai massacres. I found him in the Pakistani city of Lahore – guarded by uniformed Pakistani policemen holding machine guns.

I met the man three times and have only one question left unasked: what did he think as he watched the mass revolutions unfold in the Middle East this year – under the flags of nations rather than Islam, Christians and Muslims together, the kind of people his own al-Qaeda men were happy to butcher?

Of course, there is one more obvious question unanswered: couldn’t they have captured bin Laden? Didn’t the CIA or the Navy Seals or the US Special Forces or whatever American outfit killed him have the means to throw a net over the tiger? “Justice,” Barack Obama called his death. In the old days, of course, “justice” meant due process, a court, a hearing, a defence, a trial. Like the sons of Saddam, bin Laden was gunned down. Sure, he never wanted to be taken alive – and there were buckets of blood in the room in which he died.

But a court would have worried more people than bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia’s former head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980.

Oddly, he was not the “most wanted man” for the international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001. He gained his Wild West status by al-Qaeda’s earlier attacks on the US embassies in Africa and the attack on the US barracks in Dhahran. He was always waiting for cruise missiles – so was I when I met him. He had waited for death before, in the caves of Tora Bora in 2001 when his bodyguards refused to let him stand and fight and forced him to walk over the mountains to Pakistan. Some of his time he would spend in Karachi – he was obsessed with Karachi; he even, weirdly, gave me photographs of pro-bin Laden graffiti on the walls of the former Pakistani capital and praised the city’s imams.

His relations with other Muslims were mysterious; when I met him in Afghanistan, he initially feared the Taliban, refusing to let me travel to Jalalabad at night from his training camp – he handed me over to his al-Qaeda lieutenants to protect me on the journey the next day. His followers hated all Shia Muslims as heretics and all dictators as infidels – though he was prepared to cooperate with Iraq’s ex-Baathists against the country’s American occupiers, and said so in an audiotape which the CIA typically ignored. He never praised Hamas and was scarcely worthy of their “holy warrior” definition on May 2 which played – as usual – straight into Israel’s hands.

In the years after 2001, I maintained a faint indirect communication with bin Laden, once meeting one of his trusted al-Qaeda associates at a secret location in Pakistan. I wrote out a list of 12 questions, the first of which was obvious: what kind of victory could he claim when his actions resulted in the US occupation of two Muslim countries? There was no reply for weeks. Then one weekend, waiting to give a lecture in St Louis in the US, I was told that Al Jazeera had produced a new audiotape from bin Laden. And one by one – without mentioning me – he answered my 12 questions. And yes, he wanted the Americans to come to the Muslim world – so he could destroy them.

When Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, I wrote a long article in The Independent, pleading with bin Laden to try to save his life. Pearl and his wife had looked after me when I was beaten on the Afghan border in 2001; he even gave me the contents of his contacts book. Much later, I was told that bin Laden had read my report with sadness. But Pearl had already been murdered. Or so he said.

Yet bin Laden’s own obsessions blighted even his family. One wife left him, two more appeared to have been killed in Sunday’s American attack. I met one of his sons, Omar, in Afghanistan with his father in 1994. He was a handsome little boy and I asked him if he was happy. He said “yes” in English. But in 2009 he published a book called Growing Up bin Laden and – recalling how his father killed his beloved dogs in a chemical warfare experiment – described him as an “evil man”. In his book, he too remembered our meeting; and concluded that he should have told me that no, he was not a happy child.

By midday on May 2, I had three phone calls from Arabs, all certain that it was bin Laden’s double who was killed by the Americans – just as I know many Iraqis who still believe that Saddam’s sons were not killed in 2003, nor Saddam really hanged. In due course, al-Qaeda will tell us. Of course, if we are all wrong and it was a double, we’re going to be treated to yet another videotape from the real bin Laden – and President Barack Obama will lose the next election.

This article was published in The Independent on May 3, 2011; www.independent.co.uk

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden
 

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Osama bin Laden’s assassination should provide us with a good deal to think about.

It is increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition – except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects”. In April 2002 the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know eight months earlier when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence – which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said in his White House statement that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda”.

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the US invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervour is already very high in Pakistan and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and scepticism in much of the Muslim world.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There is more to say about (Cuban airline bomber Orlando) Bosch who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the US and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It is like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It is as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”.

There is much more to say but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

This article was posted on the blog of the online magazine Guernica on May 6, 2011; www.guernicamag.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden
 

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Osama bin Laden’s American legacy

Back in the 1960s Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a plan for dealing with the Vietnam war: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at the time, it is a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its 10th year.

As everybody not blind, deaf and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated. Literally. By Navy Seals. Or, as one of a crowd of revellers who appeared in front of the White House on May 1 put it, on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: ‘Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead’.

And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were VJ day and a sailor’s kiss said it all.

Unfortunately, in every way that matters for Americans, it is an illusion that Osama bin Laden is dead. In every way that matters, he will fight on, barring a major Obama administration policy shift in Afghanistan, and it is we who will ensure that he remains on the battlefield that George W. Bush’s administration once so grandiosely labelled the Global War on Terror.

Admittedly, the Arab world had largely left bin Laden in the dust even before he took that bullet to the head. There, the focus was on the Arab Spring, the massive, ongoing, largely non-violent protests that have shaken the region and its autocrats to their roots. In that part of the world, his death is, as Tony Karon of Time magazine has written, “little more than a historical footnote” and his dreams are now essentially meaningless.

Consider it an insult to irony, but the world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood.

The Tao of Terrorism

If analogies to The Wizard of Oz were in order, bin Laden might better be compared to that film’s wizard rather than the wicked witch. After all, he was, in a sense, a small man behind a vast screen on which his frail frame took on, in the US, the hulking proportions of a supervillain if not a rival superpower. In actuality, al-Qaeda, his organisation, was at best a ragtag crew that even in its heyday, even before it was embattled and on the run, had the most limited of operational capabilities. Yes, it could mount spectacular and spectacularly murderous actions but only one of them every year or two.

Bin Laden was never “Hitler”, nor were his henchmen the Nazis, nor did they add up to Stalin and his minions, though sometimes they were billed as such. The nearest thing al-Qaeda had to a state was the impoverished, ravaged, Taliban-controlled part of Afghanistan where some of its “camps” were once sheltered. Even the money available to bin Laden, while significant, wasn’t much to brag about, not on a superpower scale anyway. The 9/11 attacks were estimated to cost $4,00,000 to $5,00,000 which, in superpower terms, was pure chump change. 

Despite the apocalyptic look of the destruction bin Laden’s followers caused in New York and at the Pentagon, he and his crew of killers represented a relatively modest, distinctly non-world-ending challenge to the US. And had the Bush administration focused the same energies on hunting him down that it put into invading and occupying Afghanistan and then Iraq, can there be any question that almost 10 years wouldn’t have passed before he died or, as will now never happen, was brought to trial?

The world bin Laden really changed forever wasn’t in the Greater Middle East. It was here. Cheer his death, bury him at sea, don’t release any photos and he’ll still carry on as a ghost as long as Washington continues to fight its deadly, disastrous wars in his old neighbourhood

It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet into a Pax Americana for decades to come. So if you’re writing bin Laden’s obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meagre powers many times over.

After all, while he only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington – with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons and troops at its command – was capable of launching operations every day. In a sense, after 9/11, bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and turning them to his own ends.

It was he, thanks to 9/11, who insured that the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would be put into motion. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who also insured that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be launched. It was he, thanks to 9/11, who brought America’s Afghan war to Pakistan and American aircraft, bombs and missiles to Somalia and Yemen to fight that Global War on Terror. And for the last near-decade he did all this the way a Tai Chi master fights: using not his own minimal strength but our massive destructive power to create the sort of mayhem in which he undoubtedly imagined that an organisation like his could thrive.

Don’t be surprised then that in these last months or even years bin Laden seems to have been sequestered in a walled compound in a resort area just north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, doing next to nothing. Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism. In fact, the less he did, the fewer operations he was capable of launching, the more the American military did for him in creating what collapsing Chinese dynasties used to call “chaos under heaven”.

Dead and alive

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant. He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) – from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking down of our own American world where we were to cower in terror while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after. As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on US military operations we still have almost 1,00,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on. All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organisation which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

Now he is officially under the waves. In the Middle East, his idea of an all-encompassing future “caliphate” was the most ephemeral of fantasies. In a sense though, his dominion was always here. He was our excuse and our demon. He possessed us. 

When the celebrations and partying over his death fade, as they will no less quickly than did those for Britain’s royal wedding, we will once again be left with the tattered American world bin Laden willed us and it will be easy to see just how paltry a thing this “victory,” his killing, is almost 10 years later.

For all the print devoted to the operation that took him out, all the talking heads chattering away, all the hosannas being lavished on American special ops forces, the president, his planners and various intelligence outfits, this is hardly a glorious American moment. If anything, we should probably be in mourning for what we buried long before we had bin Laden’s body, for what we allowed him (and our own imperial greed) to goad us into doing to ourselves and what, in the course of that, we did, in the name of fighting him, to others.

Those chants of “USA! USA!” on the announcement of his death were but faint echoes of the ones at Ground Zero on September 14, 2001 when President George W. Bush picked up a bullhorn and promised that “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” That would be the beginning of a brief few years of soaring American hubris and fantasies of domination wilder than those of any caliphate-obsessed Islamic fundamentalist terrorist and soon enough they would leave us high and dry in our present world of dismal unemployment figures, rotting infrastructure, rising gas prices, troubled treasury and a people on the edge.

Unless we set aside the special ops assaults and the drone wars and take a chance, unless we’re willing to follow the example of all those non-violent demonstrators across the Greater Middle East and begin a genuine and speedy withdrawal from the Af-Pak theatre of operations, Osama bin Laden will never die.

On September 17, 2001 President Bush was asked whether he wanted bin Laden dead. He replied: “There’s an old poster out West, as I recall, that said ‘wanted dead or alive’.” Dead or alive. Now it turns out that there was a third option. Dead and alive.

The chance exists to put a stake through the heart of Osama bin Laden’s American legacy. After all, the man who officially started it all is theoretically gone. We could declare victory, Toto, and head for home. But why do I think that, on this score, the malign wizard is likely to win? n

This article was posted on TomDispatch.com on May 5, 2011; www.tomdispatch.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

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Pakistan: A state of perpetual self-denial

How gullible do the Americans think we are? Do they actually think that we Pakistanis would believe the lies they are spreading about Osama bin Laden’s tragic murder and his demeaning burial at sea?

We are just too smart to be made fools of like this. There was no Osama in that compound in Abbottabad. The Americans killed a lookalike. The real Osama died of gall bladder failure in a bush in Sudan in 2002. What’s more, his supposed wives that were captured from the Abbottabad compound were look-alikes too and so were the children.

But it doesn’t stop here. We Pakistanis know that the news about Osama’s death from a gall bladder ailment in Sudan in 2002 is also suspect. That guy too was a lookalike. So yes, it can safely be said that the guy they killed in Abbottabad in 2011 was actually a lookalike of the lookalike.

So when did Osama die if not in 2002 or 2011? According to a super-famous journalist and TV anchor, Tipu Sultan, who interviewed Osama in an impoverished disco in Kandahar in 1998, Osama was actually dead at the time of the interview. He said that the guy he talked to was actually a man called Abdul Al-Bakir Al-Shaikh Al-Qaedawallah, an expert Osama lookalike who told him (off the record) that Osama actually died (of malaria) in the jungles of the Congo in 1991.

Nevertheless, there is every likelihood that the Congo guy was a lookalike as well. So, in other words, the guy who the Americans claimed to have killed in Abbottabad was really a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike of a lookalike. But if we really come to the truth and reality, things do not seem so complicated. So what is this truth and reality? Simple. There never was an Osama. He was never born. It was all an American concoction.

The character of Osama bin Laden was first conceived by America’s 15th president, James Buchanan, in 1859 when, along with the queen of England, he decided to begin a new crusade against Muslims. According to the well-known Muslim historian, Naseem Hijazi, the British monarchy had accused a man called Osama bin Laden of financing and instigating the 1857 Indian army mutiny against the British imperialists.

The Americans and the British then claimed they had suppressed the mutiny by killing Osama in a daring raid. He was claimed to have been hiding in the hookah lounge of the last Mughal king, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar denied the accusations, saying no such man was seen on his radar.

The British exiled Zafar to Burma and destroyed the radar, saying there was no such thing as a radar. By the way, the guy the British claimed was Zafar was not exiled to Burma. He was only a lookalike. The real Zafar died of dengue fever in Guatemala where he had gone to raise an army against the British and to study tropical plants. Famous thinker and horticulturalist, Noam Chomsky, confirms this.

This concocted episode was rightly expunged from history books by Muslim historians until America brought the invisible Osama character back to life in the 1990s. They had originally planned to use him as a bogey to invade Canada but changed their plans when they got jealous of all the amazing and unprecedented economic, cultural and military progress taking place in Afghanistan under the Taliban and Pakistan under a bunch of handsome military men.

Thus, not surprisingly, the 9/11 episode happened. We all know who was responsible. Not a single Jew died in that attack. Neither did any animists or pagans, nor any Hindus, Christians and Sikhs. The truth is, only Muslims died in that attack. The proof? Simple. Log on to YouTube and check out the brilliant, award-winning documentaries, Loose Nut and The Drivels. Popcorn is on the house.

The guy the western media showed praising the 9/11 attacks on video was not Osama. He was just some Arab skiing enthusiast telling (with gestures) his Afghan friends about his latest skiing trip to the Alps. There never was an Osama. Just like there is no Mullah Omar, no Taliban, no al-Qaeda. They are all American concoctions.

Furthermore, America never won the war against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s break-up was also a concoction. The Soviet Union is still alive and thriving. We don’t hear about it because the Jewish-controlled media has blocked all news about the Soviet Union. That is because the Afghan and Arab mujahideen who fought against it liberated Afghanistan and conquered the Soviet Union and turned it into a caliphate. That’s why America’s next target will be Vladimir Putin (real name Valeed Amir Butinov). So if one day you hear that Americans have assassinated Putin, don’t believe it. The real Putin died of a kidney ailment in 1045 AD.

The president and prime minister of Pakistan should resign for making America make fools of Pakistanis. The army is not to be blamed. The radar that did not pick up American helicopters on May 2 was not a radar. It was a lookalike of the real thing that the Americans didn’t give us. Only the mighty Imran Khan hinted at this while picking his nose on TV the other day. It was a sign: ‘Dig deep, dear patriots. You have nothing to lose but your heads.’ Well said, Imran (real name Genghis), because, after all, who needs heads when the knees can perform the same function?

 
This article was published on Dawn.com on May 15, 2011.Courtesy: Dawn; www.dawn.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden 

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An unintended gift to the faith

Behind the ugly reality, there is poetic justice. Osama bin Laden was finally bearded in the world’s most ‘happening’ terror den: Pakistan. Osama is no more but who does not know that the cult of violence that he practised and preached in Islam’s name is alive and kicking in Pakistan as nowhere else? This article however is about Osama’s unintended gift to post-9/11 Islam.

Step back just a decade and you’d think that Muslims engaged with the ‘Islam and Modernity’ paradigm were few and far between. The dominant voices in the world of 20th century Islam, especially its latter half, were those of Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami on the Indian subcontinent), Sayyid Qutb (leading theologian of the Egypt-born Muslim Brotherhood) and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (who gave birth to Wahhabism, the rigid, intolerant Islam of Saudi Arabia).

Born and bred as a devout Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, it was easy for Osama to embrace the shared belief of Maududi and Qutb that all man-made ideas and systems – pan-Arabism, democracy, socialism, communism – were bankrupt: only Shariah law, ruthlessly enforced by an Islamic state, could restore divine order in the world. Thanks to an intermixture of Wahhabism, Qutbism and Maududism, what would otherwise have been an Afghan national liberation movement against the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s turned into a laboratory of violent, global jihad. Osama was the most lethal product of this cross-fertilisation. And then there was 9/11, al-Qaeda’s own welcome message to the 21st century and the new millennium.

Call it the Hegelian dialectic: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Some Muslims rejoiced over this “humiliation” of the only global superpower (so soon after the mujahids had facilitated the demise of the rival superpower). Others insisted that 9/11 was a mean CIA-Mossad conspiracy to fan Islamophobia. But saner members of the ummah were horrified that such a monstrosity could be committed in the name of a faith that literally means peace. The poison that Osama and al-Qaeda injected into Islam found its antidote within Islam. Thank you, Hegel.

“Islam was hijacked on 9/11”, declared the American convert Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. The UK-based scholar Ziauddin Sardar was as prompt in issuing his ‘fatwa against the fanatics’. With such opening salvos, the last decade has seen an ever growing number of Muslim voices eager not only to reclaim their faith from the extremists but also, in the words of Sardar, to “rebuild Islam brick by brick”.

Though Osama has now been rendered inactive, the terror machine is yet to be dismantled, the theology of violent jihad is yet to be pushed out of the marketplace of ideas. But there are reasons to nurture hope. You can today build a small personal library just with books entitled Seeds of Terror, The Nuclear Jihadist, Terror in the Name of God, Sacred Rage, Talibanisation of Pakistan, Descent into Chaos and so on. But should you feel so inclined, you will need to multiply shelf space several times over to add the books and videos infused with the spirit of a New Age Islam.

A decade ago the theologians of a tolerant, plural, gender-just, rights and freedom-friendly, pro-democracy Islam were few in number. Today not only is their tribe growing rapidly but an ever increasing number of Muslims, both men and women, are reading and interpreting the Koran and the traditions of the prophet in sync with modern sensibilities.

Sadly, we in India aren’t familiar with them yet. But they are important, influential names across much of the world. The US-based Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl, for example, is a strong proponent of human rights, a staunch advocate of gender equality and is among the most critical and powerful voices against puritan and Wahhabi Islam today. Then there is Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, co-founder of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California. Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre includes him in its list of the top 50 most influential Muslims in the world. The magazine Egypt Today described him as a kind of theological rock star, “the Elvis Presley of western Muslims”.

Or take Tariq Ramadan, the UK-based author of Radical Reform. An online poll by the American Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 placed Ramadan at the 49th spot in a list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals. And let’s not forget Amina Wadud, Islamic feminist, imam and author of Inside the Gender Jihad. In March 2005 she stirred up quite a storm in the Muslim world after leading a Friday prayer for over 100 male and female Muslims in New York.

In the first year of the 21st century Osama stretched the dominant Islamic thought of the 20th century to its extreme. A decade later, there is a growing body of books, lectures and the World Wide Web propounding an Islam that is at home with the modern world and vice versa. And in the last few months such intellectuals and scholars have struck common ground with the masses on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain…

Osama must have had many a nightmare during his last days of hiding.

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

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The consequences could be catastrophic in Iraq and around the world. The United States may reap a whirlwind of terrorist retaliation – and step up the possibility of nuclear Armageddon.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and company are committed to an "imperial ambition," as G. John Ikenberry wrote in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs – "a unipolar world in which the United States has no peer competitor" and in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer."

That ambition surely includes much expanded control over Persian Gulf resources and military bases to impose a preferred form of order in the region.

Even before the administration began beating the war drums against Iraq, there were plenty of warnings that US adventurism would lead to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as terror, for deterrence or revenge.

Right now, Washington is teaching the world a dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.

There is good reason to believe that the war with Iraq is intended, in part, to demonstrate what lies ahead when the empire decides to strike a blow — though "war" is hardly the proper term, given the gross mismatch of forces.

A flood of propaganda warns that if we do not stop Saddam Hussein today he will destroy us tomorrow.

Last October, when Congress granted the president the authority to go to war, it was "to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

But no country in Iraq’s neighbourhood seems overly concerned about Saddam, much as they may hate the murderous tyrant.

Perhaps that is because the neighbours know that Iraq’s people are at the edge of survival. Iraq has become one of the weakest states in the region. As a report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences points out, Iraq’s economy and military expenditures are ‘a fraction of some of its neighbours’.

Indeed, in recent years, countries nearby have sought to reintegrate Iraq into the region, including Iran and Kuwait, both invaded by Iraq.

Saddam benefited from US support through the war with Iran and beyond, up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait. Those responsible are largely back at the helm in Washington today.

President Ronald Reagan and the previous Bush administration provided aid to Saddam, along with the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, back when he was far more dangerous than he is now, and had already committed his worst crimes, like murdering thousands of Kurds with poison gas.

An end to Saddam’s rule would lift a horrible burden from the people of Iraq. There is good reason to believe that he would suffer the fate of Nicolae Ceausescu and other vicious tyrants if Iraqi society were not devastated by harsh sanctions that force the population to rely on Saddam for survival while strengthening him and his clique.

Saddam remains a terrible threat to those within his reach. Today, his reach does not extend beyond his own domains, though it is likely that US aggression could inspire a new generation of terrorists bent on revenge, and might induce Iraq to carry out terrorist actions suspected to be already in place.

Right now Saddam has every reason to keep under tight control any chemical and biological weapons that Iraq may have. He wouldn’t provide such weapons to the Osama bin Ladens of the world, who represent a terrible threat to Saddam himself.

And administration hawks understand that, except as a last resort if attacked, Iraq is highly unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction that it has — and risk instant incineration.

Under attack, however, Iraqi society would collapse, including the controls over the weapons of mass destruction. These could be "privatised," as international security specialist Daniel Benjamin warns, and offered to the huge "market for unconventional weapons, where they will have no trouble finding buyers." That really is "a nightmare scenario," he says.

As for the fate of the people of Iraq in war, no one can predict with any confidence: not the CIA, not Rumsfeld, not those who claim to be experts on Iraq, no one.

But international relief agencies are preparing for the worst.

Studies by respected medical organisations estimate that the death toll could rise to the hundreds of thousands. Confidential UN documents warn that a war could trigger a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale" — including the possibility that 30 per cent of Iraqi children could die from malnutrition.

Today the administration doesn’t seem to be heeding the international relief agency warnings about an attack’s horrendous aftermath.

The potential disasters are among the many reasons why decent human beings do not contemplate the threat or use of violence, whether in personal life or international affairs, unless reasons have been offered that have overwhelming force. And surely nothing remotely like that justification has come forward.

(Courtesy International Tribune; March 17, 2003)(Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the bestseller "9-11." He wrote this article for the New York Times Syndicate).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 13

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The US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists

"Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … (They are freedom fighters.)"

Is this a call to jihad taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the evil empire, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The evil empire was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities, the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6,000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11, bin Laden the freedom fighter is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a terrorist mastermind and an evil-doer.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Mujahedin

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country’s repressive government.

The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

Such policies enraged the wealthy semi–feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government’s progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.

Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government’s radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan Mujahedin, as the contra force was known.

Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan’s leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government’s fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a national liberation struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.

The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the Mujahedin captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the Mujahedin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil–rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia–ul–Haq’s own ambitions to dominate the region. US–run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the Islamic revolution that toppled the pro–US Shah of Iran in 1979).

Washington’s favoured Mujahedin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury freedom fighter. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

After the Mujahedin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US–supplied missiles and rockets on that city killing at least 2,000 civilians until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.

Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the Mujahedin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the world’s single largest source of heroin, supplying 60 per cent of US drug users.

In 1995, the former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime

Made in the USA

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1986, CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the Mujahedin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American black Muslims were taught sabotage skills.

The November 1, 1998, the British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained bin Laden’s operatives in 1989.

These operatives were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called Operation Cyclone.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the Mujahedin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services, MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter–Service Intelligence directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel–Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA’s approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was partly culpable for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non–Afghan mercenaries who joined the Mujahedin. The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country’s pro–US royal family.

Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia’s minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world’s largest private construction company.

Osama bin Laden’s father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill–gotten business empire.

(Bin Laden junior’s oft–quoted personal fortune of US$200–300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today’s value of the bin Laden family net worth estimated to be US$5 billion by the number of bin Laden senior’s sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)

Osama’s military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Milt Bearden, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did… [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It’s an extra $200–$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did."

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built training camps, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed terrorist universities by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the Mujahedin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism, car bombing and so on so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns…" Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly–run capitalist holding company albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with legitimate business operations.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.

Bin Laden only became a terrorist in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden’s anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes such as Egypt in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.

He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.

After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services and thousands of his mercenaries to the Taliban, which took power that September.

Today, bin Laden’s private army of non–Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.

Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.

In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the Mujahedin, as saying he would make the same call again, even knowing what bin Laden would become.

"It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."

Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation. Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism operations.

Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their work. He was in charge of the CIA–backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan Mujahedin for the US National Security Council.

The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" 

(This article has been put out by the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL).

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 7

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The ruling elite and the military establishment of Pakistan is paranoid about an independent Kashmir — and I really don’t understand why. Pakistan talks about "self–determination" as long as it means Pakistan will be able to gain. Pakistan is completely allergic to the "I" word. They have an agenda to suppress, undermine, and prevent any organized movement that begins to harness the natural aspirations of the people of Jammu & Kashmir for independent Kashmir.

Pakistan has backed groups that have a destructive approach to the freedom struggle and have a distorted agenda which exploits the name of Islam. In 1990, Pakistan realised that JKLF would not serve its selfish interests so they went to the old habits they learnt from the CIA in the Afghanistan war theatre — they backed multiple groups, most notoriously Jamaat-e-Islami and Hizbul Mujahideen and encouraged them to wipe out the pro–independence struggle while they fought India. The battle or "jihad" waged by these groups was designed to create chaos and create desperation but it never was disciplined, organized, strategic, or aimed to empower the common people of Kashmir to stand up for themselves.

Pakistan supported extremists with a Pakistani nationalistic agenda in Kashmir. It must be understood that their agenda is separate from main stream Islam and they only exploit the name of Islam for their political agenda. As such they tried to create a desperation in the Kashmiri society and force a communal revolt. There are reasons for this. An activist of Jamaat Islami once explained that they must wipe out tourism and education in order to make the common people desperate and ready for "revolution".

I never understood why in Kashmir schools were burnt or why blasts were placed in civilian, non–military zones. Why bridges were destroyed. Why Kashmiri people were kidnapped. I know of people who would have sacrificed everything for freedom who were kidnapped and told to pay so many lakhs of rupees or give their son for their organisation or be killed. Why did this happen? And why did this continue with full knowledge of the leadership of these organisations? Its absolutely inexcusable.

A Jamaat supporter once explained to me that sometimes you have to force a people to wake up and realise what is best for them. He said without jobs and education "jihad" will be the only avenue. These politicians call this creation of chaos, this self–destruction "jihad"? I call it a "facade". Do these organizations think you can call something "Islamic" and that is enough?

(T)hey manipulated and extorted. Their methods broke down political and social institutions when what was needed was a strengthening of these institutions so they might be utilised for the cause of freedom. What’s more, these organizations directly targeted JKLF boys and then they fought even among themselves. How could these organisations be expected to succeed with this type of treachery and lack of morals?

We have seen what was done to Kabul in the name of Islam — the blood of Muslims was made to run through its streets at the hands of other Muslims. Hekmatyar had a dispute with Prof. Rabbani and it resulted in the death of thousands of Afghans. Mosques were destroyed. An entire city which survived the evil Soviet onslaught was razed to the ground. This was a dispute between two Jamaat Islami supporters. And both sides called it "jihad". What’s more, the Taliban have taken their place, also in the name of Islam and also with the backing of Pakistan.

Tolerance is the epitome of Jammu and Kashmir and all the people of the state of different faiths have, do, and will live in peace with each other. And the communal flames of the last nine years have been ignited by foreign hands and have nothing to do with Kashmiri actions. And if Islam is to spread further in Jammu and Kashmir it will spread by example and by practice and according to the will of Allah— just like it did when Islam first came to Kashmir.

The truth is the people of Kashmir are sincere Muslims – meaning that they are also tolerant, positive, and caring human beings. There is a profound love for Islam and the people of Kashmir embrace tolerance and compassion towards all as part of their belief. Likewise, the people of Jammu and Kashmir are not just Muslim. In fact a significant portion of the population is Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu. And Kashmiris have co–existed in a peaceful way for centuries.

Much to the dislike of Pakistan and pro–Pak groups, the majority of Kashmiris want re–unification and independence. And they are going to have to come to terms with this reality sooner or later. And no matter how much they cloak their rhetoric in terms of "Islam" this fact is not going to disappear.

Archived from Communalism Combat, July 1999, Year 6  No. 51, Cover Story 3

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