Heart of Madness (a History)

Submitted by Steve Brown…

Before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviets had a very limited military presence there. It was the CIA’s cold war blunder — engaging in pointless provocations of the USSR in Afghanistan — that caused the Soviets to occupy that country in 1979.

Our laundered version of US history portrays the Soviet invasion as a master plan for conquest of an entire region, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, but it was nothing of the sort. The USA had precipitated an Islamic rebellion in Iran, and was backing other Islamic fundamentalists because they were “anti-communist” — a policy developed by disgraced US advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The Soviets opposed US covert operations designed to foment Islamic madness, since Islamic revolts (as in Chechnya) could destabilize the USSR too — obviously Carter-Brzezinski’s overall goal. So, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was in response to US covert action there, the equivalent of the US pointlessly provoking its ‘adversary’ to the point of a very sharp stick.  It’s a tactic Washington’s Warfare State uses to great effect to this very day.

Several years earlier, Pakistan had embarked on the process of building an atomic bomb, an endeavor encouraged by the United States as part of the Nixon Doctrine. The purpose of the Nixon Doctrine was to encourage client states to provide their own regional security, then mandated by the withdrawal of the United States from its criminal and disastrous intervention in Vietnam under assassin president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The Nixon Doctrine launched a campaign of conventional and nuclear weapons proliferation, abrogation of the Bretton-Woods agreement, and a fundamental re-alignment of US foreign policy. The collapse of Bretton-Woods by 1973 created a new breed of “hot money” banks like Nugan Hand and the Pakistani Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

The BCCI was owned by Saudi interests with royal connections in Britain, the United States (Harken Energy) and Israel. BCCI emerged as the prime financial source for funding Islamic terror activity around the world through its system of criminal banking practices that continue (in other banking forms) to this day.

Besides its role as a prime source for funding terrorist activities (private and state) and prior to its collapse, BCCI provided the backbone funding for Pakistan’s nuclear technology transfer network through Pakistan’s secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI. After the collapse of BCCI, the Pakistani ISI reversed the flow of arms and weapons technology to North Korea and Libya.

Older Americans may remember the “Vietnamization” aspect of the Nixon Doctrine, but other programs related to a series of arms-for-oil deals with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia; some of these programs spun out of control, and led to the Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas, and Koreagate scandals.

The Nixon Doctrine allowed Pakistan to engineer and enhance its nuclear capability while the U.S. agreeably turned a blind eye. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan is a Pakistani Scientist and Metallurgical Engineer widely regarded as the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program, he confessed to having been involved in a clandestine international network of nuclear weapons technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, and North Korea.

On February 5, 2004, the President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, announced that he had pardoned Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. Despite this political scandal, Khan is regarded as a great Hero of the Nation by virtually all Pakistanis.

The 1977 coup deposed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (the Prime Minister at the time of the Nixon Doctrine’s implementation) and paved the way for Zia Al Haq to become dictator. In 1979, Al Haq arranged the judicial murder of Bhutto on corruption charges, related to the McDonell-Douglas scandal, among other things. At this time the US feigned outrage re the excesses of the Zia dictatorship, and its “discovery” that Pakistan was building a uranium enrichment plant. The US regime cut-off its military aid to Pakistan at the time the CIA was carrying out its clandestine adventures in Afghanistan, thereby provoking the Soviet invasion of Pakistan’s neighbor.

Pakistani president Zia could not withstand a US arms embargo since the Pakistani bomb needed parts and technology sourced from the West; therefore Zia needed political influence in Washington, D.C. Fortunately for Zia’s Islamic bomb, Pakistan found that influence in the form of one Joanne Herring, an agent perfectly placed to recruit a dissolute and corrupt member of the House Military Appropriations Subcommittee, Charlie Wilson, to the cause. [Author note: Charlie Wilson was appointed to House Military Appropriations Subcommittee by none other than Dick Cheney.]

Herring had little difficulty selling the credulous Rep. Wilson on jihad as a means of killing commies. But killing commies wasn’t the role Zia and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had in mind for Wilson; it was just the bait. The real purpose of recruiting the flamboyant Texan was to get US sanctions lifted so Zia’s atomic bomb could go forward. The Wilson connection to Pakistan’s ISI ultimately succeeded in lifting US sanctions, and Zia’s dream of a nuclear-armed Pakistan is a reality we still must contend with.

Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI received weaponry and funding from the United States, BCCI, Saudi Arabia, Israel and other rogue terror states from 1978 until 1993, and used that weaponry and funding to back Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and other jihadi groups in their fight versus the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

One key player within the ISI was agent Omar Sayeed Sheikh, a shadowy figure who funded Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden and the 911 attacks. Presently imprisoned, Sheikh had ties to Charlie Wilson, Howard Hart, Harken Energy, and rogue elements within the CIA and Mossad/AMAN.

Someone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), using an alias, periodically wired money to hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehhi between June 2000 and the day before 9/11. The identity of this person has been a highly disputed since Zelikow’s 911 Commission refused to consider the money trail. But on September 23, 2001, it was first reported that authorities were now (finally) looking for Saeed Sheikh, though it wasn’t explained why.

The next day, it was reported that the 9/11 “paymaster” had been found, using the alias “Mustafa Ahmed.”  On October 1, 2001, the Guardian reported, “The man at the center of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh Saeed, also known as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad,” but it wasn’t immediately clear who this person was. CNN then revealed that “US investigators now believe Sheik Syed, using the alias Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad, sent more than $100,000 from Pakistan to Mohamed Atta.” More importantly, CNN confirmed that this was in fact the same Saeed Sheikh who had been released from an Indian prison in 1999.

On October 7, 2001, Pakistani President Musharraf fired Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the head of the ISI. The next day, some newspapers, mostly in India but also Pakistan, shockingly said ISI head Ahmed was fired for his role in the 9/11 attacks. A Pakistani newspaper stated, “Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed has been replaced after the FBI investigators established credible links between him and Umar Sheikh, one of the three militants released in exchange for passengers of the hijacked Indian Airlines plane in 1999.

Indian newspapers claimed that Indian intelligence had been instrumental in establishing this connection.  “Informed sources said that enough intelligence existed to prove that Sheikh transferred 100,000 US dollars into the account of Mohammed Atta at the behest of (ISI) Gen. Mahmood …” An explosive story, yet barely mentioned in the West.

The 911 Commission scrupulously avoided Sheikh’s factual and conspiratorial involvement in 911, and pinned the deed solely on Osama bin Laden. However, the source for the 911 terror attack funding has been traced to Sheikh at the behest of Ahmed and the ISI.

Unfortunately, the 911 money trail ended there when Bush lackey Zelikow suppressed all documentation and information related to the funding of the 911 terror attacks. The implicit involvement with regard to the US government funding the 911 terror attacks, whether by accident or by design, clouds the issue to an extent that the full truth about 911 will never be known. *

The microcosm of Charlie Wilson’s war to fund Pakistani terror eventually expanded to include all major governments and operatives, in a form of covert globalization of terror networks and their funding. Charlie Wilson’s War was far more than a means to swindle the U.S. government into accepting the development of nuclear weapons by rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea. Wilsons’s war, along with rogue CIA and Mossad/AMAN elements, global terror banking, the Pakistani ISI, US business interests and Neocon/Neoliberal ideologues, eventually pushed the envelope in this global terror war, waged by states and jihadis alike.

In a further twist to the tale, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh — the man who helped fund the 911 hijackers and confessed to the murder of Daniel Pearl —   has by a technicality of India’s law been prevented from being released, at least for now.

One would think that the CIA and US intelligence services would scramble to interview Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh with regard to his involvement in the 911 terror attacks, and learn what he knew about the terror underworld that has terrorized the west for decades. But of course, there is no need. Because it’s fact that the CIA and US intelligence services along with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia founded and funded the terror plague that has plagued us all, long before 911..

*a la Lee Harvey Oswald and the JFK assassination.

Steve is an antiwar activist, a published scholar on the US monetary system, and has appeared as guest contributor to The Duran, Fort Russ News, Herland Report, The Ron Paul Institute, and Strategika51.   @newsypaperz