In an important interview with David Frost (go here), Benazir Bhutto -- Pakistan's best hope for democracy -- made a reference to "the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden." A slip of the tongue, or does she know something we don't?
It was a slip. Look at the clip in context.
After talking about the horrific violence that greeted her return to Pakistan, she accuses three men of planning the attacks. Then she narrows her focus on one particular suspect. Although she never names him, her obvious target is Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the former head of the ISI, Pakistan's version of the CIA. Mahmood (sometimes spelled Mehmood) has correctly been called "the most taboo suspect of all 9/11 suspects."
After 9/11, many news accounts reported that Mahmood -- using a middleman -- wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta. Indeed, the Taliban are largely a creation of Mahmood's ISI.Although the $100,000 pay-off was reported by the BBC, UPI and the AP, this key fact seems to have gone down the memory hole. The go-between -- the man who passed the money from Mahmood to Atta -- was Omar Sheikh, sometimes called Saaed Sheikh (as well as other names).
In the afore-linked video, Bhutto references Mahmood's link to Omar Sheikh, a terrorist who is best known to Americans as the man who murdered reporter Daniel Pearl.
If you watch the Bhutto interview armed with this background information, you'll understand her error. When she says that Omar Sheikh was "the man who murdered Osama Bin Laden" she obviously meant to say "the man who murdered Daniel Pearl for Osama Bin Laden."
Why has the administration (and, to a large extent, the media) refused to go after General Mahmood? Good question.
The ISI Director worked closely with the CIA for many years, and it is known that he met with Richard Armitage, a key player in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. (Armitage helped stop Valerie Plame's efforts against nuke proliferation, and signed the infamous PNAC letter which laid the groundwork for the Iraq debacle.) Various conflicting news stories (see here) picture Mahmood as helping both the Taliban and the White House in the days before and after 9/11.
As you have probably already guessed, the drug trade appears to be the major factor linking Mahmood, the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden, and American covert forces. Pakistan was and is at the heart of a massive drug network. In March of 2002, Vanity Fair reported that the ISI controlled this underground economy.
Mahmood has highly-placed American allies. And that is why I doubt that Bhutto -- who obviously wants to bring Mahmood to justice -- will be allowed to prevail in Pakistan's turmoil.
If you have any interest in the real story behind 911, please help the folks at Cooperative Research. Their timeline IS the truth.
ADDED NOTE FOR D.U. VISITORS: I'm always grateful when Democratic Underground links to one of my stories. However, I wish DU's readers would glance at my words before offering misinformed commentary.
If you look at the readers' comments here, you'll see that some folks jumped to the conclusion that I am defending the idea that Osama Bin Laden was murdered. In fact, my intention was to state exactly the opposite -- that Bhutto clearly made a slip of the tongue in her interview with Frost.
She refers to a murder committed by Omar Sheikh, who would NOT attack Bin Laden.
Alas, some people are too lazy to listen to her actual words. Or to follow her argument. Or to read my actual words. Or to look up unfamiliar names via Google.
One reader even goes so far as to say that "The website seems to speculate a lot." Not in this story. When I have speculated elsewhere, I clearly label surmise and guesswork as such.
5 comments:
Sorry that I can't be less irresponsible about this, but I recall reading in early 1989 about Poppy Bush's foreign-policy initiatives regarding Afghanistan (Bananistan!). Plus, and maybe it's a coincidence, but until Clinton eliminated the federal annual deficits, the deficit $ amounts always equalled the US black-market drug economy $ amounts. Hey, did you see that cartoon in The New Yorker a few weeks ago? Two planes flying in opposite directions are pulling an ad banner from each end, the banner reads "A Man a Plan a Canal Panama". Did you ever see (probably in 1990) that video footage taken during Poppy's roundup of Manuel Noriega? A US Army soldier, a kid, tells a reporter/photographer to "step back behind the line, sir", but the photographer doesn't obey, so the kid shoots him in the head with his .45 automatic, the guy drops out of the frame, you can see his blood ribboning along the ground fast, the kid looks deadpan into the video camera recording everything. It was shown (my local PBS affiliate WQED or WQEX ran it around midnight once a week) on the very short-lived series called "The Eighties".
Can we ever see that series again, is it for sale? Can we or can we not handle the truth?
(When there were drafts of soldiers for WW2, the Army had learned to its dismay that a very high percentage of infantry men would not fire their rifles if they thought they would be killing someone. Sorry for not providing any sources, but they exist.)
Thanks for the link to Cooperativeresearch.org. They both deserve and need all of the financial support they can get.
There's something seriously wrong with the priorities of the American people when sites like Cooperativeresearch.org, Consortiumnews.com, and Narconews.com are supported by mere handfuls of people- probably fewer than 1000 at each site over the years, as far as I can tell. Much fewer.
Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans- including those identifying themselves as "liberals", "progressives", "freedom-lovers", and "patriots"- continue to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars on luxuries, consumer toys and frivolous entertainments, unceasingly.
This is not a lecture coming from a hair-shirted ascetic. In some ways, my tastes are markedly Epicurean. But enough is enough. Notwithstanding my modest income- lets just say that it's well under the national average- I've managed to be one of the, ahem, several hundred people- out of all of the multitude who regularly browse such sites for free- who actually sustains them with periodic cash donations- $25 here, $50 there.
If I can do it, so can you.
I could go on about all of the multimillionaire- and even centimillionaire- Democrats in the Congress who could fund a host of progressive media outlets all by themselves, simply by pooling the windfalls they've received from the Bush tax cuts over the past few years- if they had a mind to, that is. But that's the topic for another screed.
In the meantime, if they're not going to do it, YOU have to do it.
Although the Taliban was a creature of the ISI, that meant they were also creatures of the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI from the Afghan war against the Soviets forward to straight ahead poppy/opium/heroin trafficking.
The 'proof' that this guy ordered the $100,000 wired to Atta was that such a call supposedly originated from a cell phone number owned by this man. However, electronic technology being what it is, spoofing caller ids to say anything you want is entirely easy, so much so that these things are available commercially, let alone to the intel services. Considering this fact, I have become less convinced over time of the general's involvement being established by this sole fact.
Another mitigating fact is that the Taliban was not the great friend to Osama bin Laden as has been portrayed. Evidently, they eventually tired of his having an independent power base apart from their own, and were considering strongly getting him out of the country, going so far as to offer him to the Bush administration some dozen or more times. (These offers were considered unserious by the Bush administration, but who knows, as the potential for a deal involving turning bin Laden over was never explored. They occurred mainly before the 9/11 incident, but also, afterwards, when they offered to turn him over to a third party country, if they were shown any evidence of his involvement.)
The conflation of the Taliban with drug running seems wrong, considering a) the so-called Northern Alliance opposed to the Taliban were definitely drug lords, and b) the Taliban eradicated the entire poppy crop one year.
...sofla
You're right -- there are Dems in high places (not THAT many) who could toss ten, twenty thou at (say) Bob Parry, who certainly deserves that largesse and more. But then Parry would have to think, with every story he wrote, "Am I going to say anything that might embarrass my patron?"
I understand that dilemma only too well.
Still, I see no reason whatsoever why ways can't be found for wealthy progressives (if any genuine ones exist) to support investigative reportage and alternative news media sites anonymously. I mean, presumably it would mean forgoing a tax deduction- to which my reaction is: "So what?"
And "anonymous" in such a case should actually really mean "anonymous"- as in, should the beneficiary ever testify under oath, they could truthfully say "No, I don't know who sends us money. I'm just glad that they do. Not only do they not influence my reportage, I have no contact with them, beyond the fact of the donations."
(Although presumably one would feel compelled to come up with another answer, if waterboarded.)
The funding problems of authentic independent journalists and researchers do amount to a serious conundrum- because even if a wealthy funding patron has enough integrity that they guarantee complete autonomy for those who receive their contributions, that doesn't stop the targets of investigative research stories (and their cronies and ideological allies) from highlighting the sources of funding as if they were the issue, rather than the content. The facts of the case have often been buried by such misdirections.
Ironically, typically this tactic achieves success with the help of the major news media outlets, who can't seem to winnow a genuine trail of evidence and factual revelation from the red herrings dragged across the path. For whatever reason, I'm declining to speculate...I'll merely note that such professional incompetence is all too common in the ranks of what Americans are encouraged to think of as the Major Leagues of Journalism.
Meanwhile, I can think of quite a number of Outcast Journalists- and even "sandlot players"- possessing the skills, quickness, and independence of mind to outplay the All-Stars of the Media Big League with one hand tied behind their backs.
And they can't seem to get paid-
-which brings me back to the summation of my previous comment-
unless WE do it.
More than, like, 500 of us.
Really, I'd rather NOT get the rich involved. That simply tends to confuse matters. But that means that enough people of ordinary means recognize the responsibility of initiating and supporting "freeware journalism" that it actually obtains a power akin to a political cause- not in any partisan sense, but in a values sense. Anti-corruption, pro-honesty, pro-openness, pro-integrity, independent-minded, fearless.
If not enough people can tell the difference between the quality and content of the news unearthed by authentic journalists and the slickly packaged swill proffered by Big Media- well, then, I guess Democracy is just a hoax.
If, out of the entire voting population of the USA, 500-1000 people is the most any of the websites I listed can count on to support them...just how phony is this country, anyway?
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