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by Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen
Report – November 18, 2005
Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary
Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a
terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms
smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and
money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a
journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from
an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for
French military intelligence.
"I first heard
about Al-Qaeda while I was attending the Command and Staff course in
Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces
had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
"Two of my
Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense
officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of
jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when
one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two
officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat'
which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You
will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would
used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision
database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they
used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaeda.'
"In the early
1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah,
Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference
Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its
accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was
more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.
"It was decided to
use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's
database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the
database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments
of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world
were connected to that network.
"[According to a
Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the
information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up
and send information they needed, and the decision file where the
decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In
Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat
i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q
eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word
database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaeda which is
the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base"
and "Al Qaeda" means "the base."
"In the mid-1980s,
Al Qaeda was a database located in computer and dedicated to the
communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.
"In the early
1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the
French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was
also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by
our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent
by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.
"These documents
contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in
France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in
the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or
tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the
United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaeda.
"Al Qaeda remained
the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the
Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick
up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin
Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important
family in the banking and business world.
"Because of the
presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use
the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaeda was used, with
some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the
mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in
Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action
anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the
'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi
Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the
Al Qaeda Intranet was a good communication system through coded or
covert messages.
Al Qaeda was
neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . .
The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and
the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These
crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the
British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish'
Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.
" . . . In the
Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of
mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are
in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.
" Some Islamic
economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic
lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al
Qaeda. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries
under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive
wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the
lobbies concealed behind them.
"The truth is,
there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda. And any
informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda
campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified
entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher'
to accept a unified international leadership for a war against
terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the
lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making
money." (Our emphasis, Ed.)
In yet another
example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December
2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military
court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO
bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in
1998. Bunel's case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the
details of the case classified. Bunel's character witnesses and
psychologists notwithstanding, the system "got him" for telling the
truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist
attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that
Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the
French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and
Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al
Qaeda." We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money
provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special
fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith.
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