XPost: soc.culture.yugoslavia, soc.rights.human, alt.politics.religion   
   XPost: alt.anarchism, alt.religion.christianity   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   The US-Al Qaeda Alliance: Bosnia, Kosovo and Now Libya. Washington’s On-Going   
   Collusion with Terrorists   
      
   by Prof. Peter Dale Scott   
      
   	   
   Global Research, July 29, 2011   
   The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 1, August 1, 2011   
      
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   Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military   
   spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in   
   the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon   
   increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s   
   interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden   
   from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert   
   U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.   
      
   U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the   
   compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some   
   Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper   
   motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both   
   instances.   
      
   In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been   
   battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the   
   post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 –   
   the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s   
   excesses as an excuse for intervention.   
      
   But there have been other interventions in which Americans have used al-Qaeda   
   as a resource to increase their influence, for example Azerbaijan in 1993.   
   There a pro-Moscow president was ousted after large numbers of Arab and other   
   foreign mujahedin veterans were secretly imported from Afghanistan, on an   
   airline hastily organized by three former veterans of the CIA’s airline Air   
   America. (The three, all once detailed from the Pentagon to the CIA, were   
   Richard Secord, Harry Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn.)2 This was an ad hoc marriage   
   of convenience: the mujahedin got to defend Muslims against Russian influence   
   in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, while the Americans got a new president   
   who opened up the oilfields of Baku to western oil companies.   
      
   The pattern of U.S. collaboration with Muslim fundamentalists against more   
   secular enemies is not new. It dates back to at least 1953, when the CIA   
   recruited right-wing mullahs to overthrow Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran, and   
   also began to cooperate with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.3 But in Libya in   
   2011 we see a more complex marriage of convenience between US and al-Qaeda   
   elements: one which repeats a pattern seen in Bosnia in 1992-95, and Kosovo in   
   1997-98. In those countries America responded to a local conflict in the name   
   of a humanitarian intervention to restrain the side committing atrocities. But   
   in all three cases both sides committed atrocities, and American intervention   
   in fact favored the side allied with al-Qaeda.   
      
   The cause of intervention was fostered in all three cases by blatant   
   manipulation and falsification of the facts. What a historian has noted of the   
   Bosnian conflict was true also of Kosovo and is being echoed today in Libya:   
   though attacks were “perpetrated by Serbs and Muslims alike,” the pattern in   
   western media was “that killings of Muslims were newsworthy, while the deaths   
   of non-Muslims were not.”4 Reports of mass rapes in the thousands proved to be   
   wildly exaggerated: a French journalist “uncovered only four women willing to   
   back up the story.”5 Meanwhile in 1994 the French intellectual Bernard-Henri   
   Lévy (BHL) traveled to Bosnia and fervently endorsed the case for intervention   
   in Bosnia; in 2011 February BHL traveled to Benghazi and reprised his   
   interventionist role for Libya.6   
      
   In all of the countries mentioned above, furthermore, there are signs that   
   some American and/or western intelligence groups were collaborating with   
   al-Qaeda elements from the outset of conflict, before the atrocities cited as   
   a reason for intervention.. This suggests that there were deeper reasons for   
   America’s interventions including the desire of western oil companies to   
   exploit the petroleum reserves of Libya (as in Iraq) without having to deal   
   with a troublesome and powerful strong man, or their desire to create a   
   strategic oil pipeline across the Balkans (in Kosovo).7   
      
   That the U.S. would support al-Qaeda in terrorist atrocities runs wholly   
   counter to impressions created by the U.S. media. Yet this on-going unholy   
   alliance resurrects and builds on the alliance underlying Zbigniew   
   Brzezinski’s 1978-79 strategy of provocation in Afghanistan, at a time when he   
   was President Carter’s National Security Adviser.   
      
   In those years Brzezinski did not hesitate to play the terrorist card against   
   the Soviet Union: he reinforced the efforts of the SAVAK (the Shah of Iran’s   
   intelligence service) to work with the Islamist antecedents of al-Qaeda to   
   destabilize Afghanistan, in a way which soon led to a Soviet invasion of that   
   country.8 At the time, as he later boasted, Brzezinski told Carter, “We now   
   have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”9   
      
   CIA Director William Casey continued this strategy of using terrorists against   
   the USSR in Afghanistan. At first the CIA channeled aid through the Pakistani   
   ISI (Interservices Intelligence Service) to their client Afghan extremists   
   like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar (today one of America’s enemies in Afghanistan). But   
   in 1986, “Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to   
   recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight   
   with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”10 CIA aid now reached their support Office of   
   Services in Peshawar, headed by a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, and by Osama   
   bin Laden. The al-Kifah Center, a U.S. recruitment office for their so-called   
   Arab-Afghan foreign legion (the future al Qaeda), was set up in the al-Farook   
   mosque in Brooklyn.11   
      
   It is important to recall Brzezinski’s and Casey’s use of terrorists today.   
   For in Libya, as earlier in Kosovo and Bosnia, there are alarming signs that   
   America has continued to underwrite Islamist terrorism as a means to dismantle   
   socialist or quasi-socialist nations not previously in its orbit: first the   
   USSR, then Yugoslavia, today Libya. As I have written elsewhere, Gaddafi was   
   using the wealth of Libya, the only Mediterranean nation still armed by Russia   
   and independent of the NATO orbit, to impose more and more difficult terms for   
      
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