Al Qaeda and National Defense

This deserves a longer post but I just got the inspiration and need to jet to work so...

- Al Qaeda seems to be a real, or semi-real, international terrorist network.
- Who all is a part of it or just "linked" in some vague way to create a greater sense of global reach than is actually true - not totally clear. (see Jiason Burke's works)
- There are undoubtedly real terrorists with grievances, driven to the point of murder and martyrdom - and they join networks.

Yet al Qaeda itself rests on this man bin Laden, with one or two-degree separation from so many American elites, a known CIA asset status for at least a decade, used in the Balkans etc up to 2000 anyway, etc...

Is al Qaeda a giant honeytrap operation to lure would-be terrorists into a scripted and controlled "global menace?"

Consider this: American force projection relies on strong defense budgets. What was the last nation to openly attack us - or even be reasonably well-blamed? With no attacks, no need for defense.

The Cold War's seriousness kept the emergency permanent enough no attacks were needed. The 90s saw declining military spending. In steps al Qaeda. Not a nation. They're crazy! And diffuse! They can attack at will:
94 ? - Dahrain
95 Bojinka
98 - Africa Embassy bombings
2000 - USS Cole
2001 - 9/11 - the first suicide hijacking ever to NOT be PREVENTED.

Then Osama claims responsibility and all's magically well and good?
And again the permanent emergency state. We can't wait for a mushroom cloud, etc. War after war, defense spending up, proection up. We enter right in the middle of Euraisa and work on the fringes next. ... How convenient!

A useful cancer?

[edit on 25-4-2007 by Caustic Logic]

I must be writing my threds wrong. I hardly ever get any responses. Ah well.

I don't think you are writing your threads wrong.

I think that your original post is an interesting hypothesis.

There are a couple of building points you make that have questionable, at least debatable validity.

Such as Al Queda resting predominately on Bin Laden. And OBL's myth in Afganistan (before the Taliban) -- Remember when the US was moving into Afganistan after 9/11? Who was helping us? --Who, that was native to Afganistan? Do you remember?

Here is a link, please "listen" to the audio interview with the researcher, it gives tremendous insight into Al Queda, and Bin Laden.

www.npr.org...

Originally posted by GwionX
I don't think you are writing your threads wrong.

I think that your original post is an interesting hypothesis.

There are a couple of building points you make that have questionable, at least debatable validity. Such as Al Queda resting predominately on Bin Laden.

Thanks GX - I'm sure I don't have it all figured out. I haven't really looked into the network that much, but looking at the big picture I gotta think it all seems a bit convenient. Have since the beginning. Degrees of autonomy, degree and method of control, etc. I'm noy making any specific claim.

And OBL's myth in Afganistan (before the Taliban) -- Remember when the US was moving into Afganistan after 9/11? Who was helping us? --Who, that was native to Afganistan? Do you remember?

The Northern Alliance you mean? Karzai? I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Here is a link, please "listen" to the audio interview with the researcher, it gives tremendous insight into Al Queda, and Bin Laden.

www.npr.org...

Getting back on late and I'm tired now so it's not much better but - Listening to the audio now:
First - I take anything with a grain of salt, Wright as well. Showbiz creds, semi-critical but credible, pretty much the official story as I've heard it.

Different objectives of the Arab Afghans, weemed of no help - interesting. Were they even there to help or to train for their future role?

More good stuff - of what ever value it is. I noted a few spots of odd tactics - "errors" on both sides. They kill too much, provoke, and get terrorism cracked-down on, like at Luxor. Clinton let Osama go from Sudan. "if we send him away he might be more trouble" the Sudanese warned. He was sent away. oops. To Afghanistan, where he needed to be for the plans that finally unfolded. We ain't in Suydan now, not interested in it then either. And Mogadishu sent the message "attack us, we're weak."

Hmmm... seeing a bit of entrapment or something. I dunno.

Thanks for the link!
And for an open mind despite the admittedly audacious theory.

I have been looking at this too. I think al Qaeda is the product of a modern-day, global Operation Gladio; and the 'War on Terror' a modern-day, global 'Strategy of Tension'.

See here for a bit more of what I think.

Originally posted by coughymachine
I have been looking at this too. I think al Qaeda is the product of a modern-day, global Operation Gladio; and the 'War on Terror' a modern-day, global 'Strategy of Tension'.

See here for a bit more of what I think.

Thamks C-eye! It's too much to read proper right now, but very informative. I'll be reading it soon.
I've been meaning to look into Gladio a bit, as it touches back on other research I do: the "Color Revolution," weaponized non-violence from Serbia to Ukraine to NATO's and others' benefit - this might just be the link - or another - between 9/11 and that world.

My extended take on al Qaeda:

...no sooner had our bloodlust been sated by Saddam’s grizzly demise than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), putative ‘principal architect of the 9/11 attacks’, was wheeled out.

His ‘confession’ to a combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, that bore all the hallmarks of a Stalinist purge, came as US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced mounting pressure following the politicised dismissals of eight US attorneys. In it, he admitted and affirmed ‘without duress that [he] was responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant in’ 31 terror attacks or plots. With his connection to the 9/11 attacks well-established, ‘it is not’, as The Guardian points out, ‘clear why Mohammed would have wished to confess to such a wide-ranging number of outrages.’

There has, of course, been much scepticism about the legitimacy of his confession. Some fear it may have been coerced, citing Bush’s discomfiture with the Geneva Convention’s insistence that interrogations involve ‘no outrages upon human dignity’. Others point out that KSM, who was detained in March 2003, could not have been ‘responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the New (or Second) Wave of attacks against the… Plaza Bank, Washington state’, for example, since the Plaza Bank was founded in 2006.

Not much has been said, however, about the admission that most caught my eye:

I was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian nationals.

The 2002 Bali bombings killed 202 and left a further 209 injured. Suspicions immediately fell upon Jemaah Islamiyah, a radical Islamist terror group with links to al Qaeda. But, although several members of this group have since been tried and convicted for their involvement in the plot, one tantalising trail has been allowed to go cold. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the then Indonesian Prime Minister, Abdurrahman Wahid, believed that the order to plant the bomb which destroyed Bali's Sari Club came from Indonesia’s ‘armed forces not from the fundamentalist people.’ In other words, the Bali bombing was a false flag operation.

Crucially, it came at a time when Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s support for the War on Terror was perceived as being weak. Some have construed this as evidence that the US isn’t just managing the flow of Goldstein propaganda but is actually managing Goldstein; that al Qaeda is a modern day network of Gladio-like clandestine armies, prosecuting a modern-day, US-backed Strategy of Tension (see Operation Gladio and The Strategy of Tension).