Iraq Tempts Bin Laden To Attack WestPosted on 09/18/2001 8:30:04 PM PDT by Uncle Bill
Iraq Tempts Bin Laden To Attack West
The Herald
By Ian Bruce
December 28, 1999
The world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, has been offered sanctuary in Iraq if his worldwide terrorist network succeeds in carrying out a campaign of high-profile attacks on the West over the next few weeks.
Intelligence sources say the Saudi dissident believed responsible for the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and a US military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1998, is running out of options for a safe haven.
He is now thought to have overcome his initial rejection of Saddam Hussein, whom he regarded as an exploiter of the Islamic cause rather than a true believer, and is considering the offer of a bolt-hole from which he can continue to mastermind terrorism on a global scale.
A US counter-terrorist source said yesterday: "Our State Department issued a worldwide warning on December 11. We have solid information that many of the groups operating under bin Laden's patronage are planning 'spectaculars' to coincide with the period leading up to and through the millennium celebrations.
"They want to inflict maximum loss of life in return for publicity. Now we are also facing the prospect of an unholy alliance between bin Laden and Saddam. The implications are terrifying.
"We might be looking at the most wanted man on the FBI's target list gaining access to chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons courtesy of Iraq's clandestine research programmes."
The US intelligence community has been squeezing bin Laden's finances steadily for several years. His personal fortune of anything up to £500m has been whittled down to single figures, although funds continue to flow into the coffers of his Al Qaeda - Arabic for "The Base" - organisation from wealthy individuals in the Middle East.
These include members of the Saudi royal family opposed to American involvement in the region and rich businessmen in the Gulf States hoping to buy themselves immunity if bin Laden's Islamic revolution ever manages to overthrow their governments.
But the bulk of his income comes from acting as middleman and fixer for the Afghan opium producers. According to the United Nations, Afghanistan supplies 75% of the world's opium and its heroin derivatives in a narcotics' trade worth an estimated £4bn to £6bn a year.
The Taleban religious fanatics who control 85% of Afghanistan need the cash to fund their never-ending civil wars. They gave bin Laden refuge because he had connections with the Chechen and Russian mafias and their access to money-laundering in the West.
According to Middle Eastern intelligence sources, bin Laden rakes off anything up to £500m a year from his pivotal role in the drugs' trade. It is more than enough to underwrite the cost of mujahideen training camps in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan and the provision of weapons for bin Laden's personal war against the US and its allies.
Up to 20 Islamic extremist groups operate under the loose control of Al Qaeda.
They include Algeria's GSPC, responsible for the casual murder of civilians in the country's Kabylie region, and a network for recruiting Muslim volunteers to fight in the Balkans and Chechnya.
Al Qaeda's tentacles spread across Europe and the Middle East, including the United Kingdom. Up to 2000 young Muslims a year were enlisted in Britain between 1995 and 1998 to fight militant Islam's cause.
They received basic survival and unarmed combat training in Britain, and were then flown to various camps in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to be instructed in the use of firearms and explosives. A few were involved in combat in the latter stages of the Bosnian conflict.
The spread of bin Laden's influence has spawned some strange alliances.
Israel's Mossad agency is currently helping the Russians identify known fundamentalist militants in Chechnya. British, Italian and US agents reportedly co-operated with Slobodan Milosevic's regime to root out veterans of the 1979-89 Afghan-Russia war while they were themselves on opposite sides in Bosnia.
The Americans have also resorted to hi-tech destabilisation. Various agencies inserted "sniffer" software programmes into the banking systems of Europe and the Middle East from the mid-1990s onwards.
These were targeted on known or suspected accounts for bin Laden's front men in Holland, Britain, Switzerland, Italy, the US and the Caribbean.
When large amounts of cash were moved around, the programmes flagged up the transactions. Computer experts then transferred or deleted the cash electronically to starve Al Qaeda of funding.
Bin Laden has almost outstayed his welcome in Afghanistan. Despite the Taleban's public declaration of protection for a "guest", the regime is suffering from international sanctions as long as it harbours him.
The Americans have a continually updated plan for a special forces' team to snatch him from his mountain lair in the Hindu Kush.
But they look back to a Soviet raid in the same area in April, 1986, when three battalions of elite Spetznaz commandos went in after a local Afghan commander. Few came back.
Bin Laden is understood to have selected Yemen, his father's birthplace, as a first alternative. But the Yemenis could not protect him from the wrath of the West or Saudi Arabia. Chechnya was his second choice, but the province is being ground under Russia's military jackboot.
That leaves Iraq, and the potential for an alliance which would be everyone else's nightmare.
[End of Transcript]
SADDAM'S FINGERPRINTS ON 1993 N.Y. BOMBINGS
Fact Sheet: The Taliban and the Afghan Drug Trade
Massive Poppy Cultivation Harms the Afghan People
The Explosion of Poppy Cultivation Under the Taliban
Taliban's Bans on Poppy Cultivation Lack Credibility
Interview with Alfred McCoy
"Let's take two more examples that bring it right up to the present. [First] the Afghan operation: from 1979 to the present, the CIA's largest operation anywhere in the world, was to support the Afghan resistance forces fighting the Soviet occupation in their country. The CIA worked through Pakistan military intelligence and worked with the Afghan guerilla groups who were close to Pakistan military intelligence.
In 1979 Pakistan had a small localized opium trade and produced no heroin whatsoever. Yet by 1981, according to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, Pakistan had emerged as the world's leading supplier of heroin. It became the supplier of 60% of U.S. heroin supply and it captured a comparable section of the European market. In Pakistan itself the results were even more disastrous.
In 1979 Pakistan had no heroin addicts, in 1980 Pakistan had 5,000 heroin addicts, and by 1985, according to official Pakistan government statistics, Pakistan had 1.2 million heroin addicts, the largest heroin addict population in the world.
Who were the manufacturers? They were all either military factions connected with Pakistan intelligence, CIA allies, or Afghan resistance groups connected with the CIA and Pakistan intelligence. In May of 1990, ten years after this began, the Washington Post finally ran a front page story saying high U.S. officials admit that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group], and other leaders of the Afghan resistance are leading heroin manufacturers.
This had been known for years, reported in the Pakistan press, indeed in 1980 reported in McClean's magazine. In fact in 1980 a White House narcotics advisor, Dr. David Musto of Yale University, went on the record demanding that we not ally with Afghan guerilla groups that were involved in narcotics. His advice was ignored and he went public in an op-ed in the New York Times."
Three-quarters of the world's supply of heroin have not been planted this year on the orders of the Taliban
"You can be sure the criminals are responding to the new situation in the market."
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Folks, it does not get any better than this! By wiping out Afghanistan's opium crop, we win big in the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs!
Common sense in the extreme!
Newsmax
Sept. 18, 2001
Link
Former Attorney General Ed Meese said late Tuesday that an intelligence report linking Twin Tower terror pilot Mohammed Atta to Iraqi intelligence may mean that a U.S. military response to last week's attacks could include the elimination of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Meese made the startling prediction in an interview on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes."
HANNITY: If this turns out to be true and we connect this to Iraq and we connect this to Saddam Hussein, do we have to have a policy that it's time for him to go specifically?
MEESE: Well, I think once we're in a war, as we are now, and once we find that a nation has contributed to our enemy -- to the terrorists, those supporting the terrorists -- if our leaders are morally certain of that, then I think that everything we would do in a war is proper, is legal and is reasonable.
So I think then going after (Hussein), certainly going after his headquarters, going after his military establishment and if in the course of that we have to hit him, I think that's very appropriate. (End of Excerpt)
Hours before Meese made his comments, CBS News reported that an intelligence report obtained by U.S. officials shows terror-pilot Atta met with the chief of Iraqi intelligence in Europe earlier this year.
[End of Transcript]
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