Al Qaeda And The USA
By Michael Robeson
05 June, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Within days of September 11, 2001, Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State, made a proposal that would have really changed everything forever.
In a nationally syndicated Op Ed, entitled “Destroy the Terrorist’s Network” he wrote that the attack “which is a threat to our social way of life…has to be dealt with (by) an attack on the system that produces it.” He also wrote that the US government “should be charged with a systematic response that…will end with the destruction of the system that is responsible for it.”
In a May 2012 television interview, current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, admitted for the first time that the US had created Al Qaeda in the late 1970’s and funded its participation in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. “We had helped to create the problem that we are now fighting”, Ms. Clinton said. “The people we are fighting today, we were supporting when we were fighting the Soviets.”
President Barak Obama and his predecessor George W. Bush have both made amply clear that the war against terror includes any persons, groups or states that give material or financial assistance to terrorist organizations. Anyone doubting that Dr. Kissinger was not cognizant, in 2001, that the Al Qaeda network had been founded and funded by his own government, should recall that his protégé, National Security Advisor under President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was famously photographed in Pakistan in the early 1980’s eyeing the barrel of a gun that the US government had supplied to Al Qaeda and to its leader who was standing in the photo beside him – Osama bin Laden. Though Dr. Kissinger was out of office at that time, could he have retained his credentials as perennial advisor to American Presidents without maintaining his cognizance of such complex events?
Why then would Dr. Kissinger have openly proposed an attack on the very state that he himself has so faithfully served throughout his entire political career and have felt immune from charges of treason or of being a terrorist himself for doing so?
Ms. Clinton gives us a clue about this apparent psychopathic thinking. In a February 2012 BBC interview, Clinton stated, regarding the Obama administration’s handling of the armed insurrection against the Syrian government, “I would not be doing my job if I were not looking at the complexity…. Clearly I know how complex this is.” Here, she extols her competence that mere mortals do not possess. What makes her job so complex, of course, is the need to figure out how to publicly stage manage the events that her government has created and through its media is manipulating to its geo-strategic benefit, all the while giving the appearance of innocently spreading freedom and democracy to unenlightened natives.
“We were successful,” said Ms. Clinton in her May 2012 Al Qaeda interview. “The Soviets left Afghanistan and we said ‘Great, goodbye’ leaving these trained people who were fanatical…well armed, creating a mess, frankly, that at the time we didn't really recognize...we just thought, ok fine, we're ok now. Everything's going to be so much better.” Unfortunately, the Secretary of State was not quoting the remarks of a teen-age girl at a community college debating society, for here she is portraying her government, and by extension herself, as an innocent caught in the snares of an evil and dangerous world. Still, Ms. Clinton is quite correct in that everything is so much better, not to mention so much more profitable, for those who can create the mess, spin its deadly aftermath and then be heralded by the public for, among other statesmanlike qualities, the complexity of their thought.
There has been some media dialogue of recent about what is apparently the psychopathic behavior of Wall Street speculators and the incalculable damage they laughingly do to American society. Such a dialogue is long in coming and should be extended to the advocates of the “war against terror.” Since last year, it has been publicly known that the U.S. and NATO supported and financed Al Qaeda groups in Libya in their mutually planned overthrow of the Qadaffi government. These same terrorist groups had earlier fought in Iraq where they committed terrorist actions fighting against the occupying U.S. military. It is now known that, following the Libyan rebellion, that those same fighters were shipped to NATO funded bases in Turkey and there trained to fight in the bloody insurrection against the Syrian government. How many of the atrocities committed against the Syrian people have been committed by those terrorist fighters is never touched upon by the media. This allows the Obama administration to posture about its concern for Syrian civilians while planning for them the same fate that Libyan, Iraqi and Afghan civilians are now enduring.
The media’s ignoring of these known facts about Al Qaeda allows the American public to avoid confronting two fundamental questions: If the U.S. is committed to destroying Al Qaeda, why hasn’t it providing assistance to the governments attacked by it - Libya and Syria? And, if the U.S. were actually at war against terrorism and Al Qaeda, why isn’t it, as Dr. Kissinger suggested, attacking elements of itself and NATO in order to destroy those responsible for the terrorist’s actions?
In the upside-down world that war on terror advocates live in (and expect the rest of us to accept as reality) the Al Qaeda fighters who fought in Afghanistan against the Evil Empire (the Russian one, that is) were good, but then became bad shortly before September 11 and afterwards needed to be destroyed. Then, in the middle of their multiple and barbaric terrorist activities around the world, they suddenly become good enough to qualify for financial and logistical support in supporting the U.S. NATO and Israel in their colonial conquests of the remaining non-obsequious Arab governments. The eventual fate of these Al Qaeda fighters is of as little concern to their Western paymasters as is the fate of its taxpaying citizens living, willingly or not, in this upside-down world created by those managing its complexity. The U.S. government was, and is, an intrinsic and essential part of the “terrorist network,” which could not exist without its connivance and which would not fight without being paid by the direct approval of the U.S. Unbelievable? Well how else to explain why Kissinger has not written an Op Ed advocating the destruction of the Saudi regime and why the U.S. has not attacked it for being material and financial supporters of those groups?
Dr. Kissinger’s treasonable and terroristic suggestion made so soon after the horror of September 11 would come as no surprise to police investigators. They often say about criminals – Something in them wants to be found out, and caught. A religious believer would say that their soul is crying out to be saved. With the current crop of apparently soul dead American leaders, who can know? Former President Bush’s checking under a table in response to a reporter’s question about the never located Iraqi weapon’s of mass destruction, President Obama’s joke about ordering a drone attack on a White House reporter and Ms. Clinton’s laughing remarks about the killing of Qadaffi “We came, we saw, he died!” open a dark window on the conscience of all too many American leaders. How many normal people are able to understand the complexity of creating the appearance of talking peace while creating mayhem, and receiving a hefty paycheck from the citizens they have sworn to serve while doing so?
They are laughing at us. Not just the Al Qaeda leaders who see the U.S. as destroying itself from within, as Osama bin Laden claimed it would. Worse, it is our own leaders who are snickering at us. While they make their jokes and pontificate as peacemakers, they are laughing at us. “We just thought, ok fine, we're ok now. Everything is going to be so much better.” Our leaders know us the way they know themselves. They love to feel in control while they are being manipulated. Stock market frauds. Gambling casinos. Pornography. Drugs. Psychotropics. Ha Ha Ha! We are good and innocent and we are helping people to be free like us. Ha Ha Ha! They love to be manipulated, just like we do.
“Any government that shelters groups…involved in the attack, must pay an exorbitant price” Kissinger wrote in his 2001 Op Ed. Who can deny that average Americans have not been doing so? But not only materially in their lost homes, their lost jobs, their lost savings. Also, and perhaps most importantly for the future of American society, in the price Americans are paying for their lost capacity to recognize liars and their bullshit and to call them out by their names.
Mike Robeson is a middleaged ex-pat living in Italy. Reader comments are welcome at [email protected]
Due to a recent spate of abusive, racist and xenophobic comments we are forced to revise our comment policy and has put all comments on moderation que.