afrika

Wikileaks mischt Zimbabwe auf

Dr. Alexander von Paleske — 13.9. 2011 —
Vor einer Woche veröffentlichten wir hier einen Artikel, der sich kritisch mit der unredigierten Veröffentlichung von Botschafts-Cables auseinandersetzt.

Wir wiesen vor allem darauf hin, dass – wie im Falle Weißrusslands geschehen – Personen der Mitgliedschaft bzw. Kollaboration mit der Opposition beschuldigt würden und damit der Gefahr der Verhaftung, schlimmstenfalls der Tötung, ausgesetzt sind.

Wikileaks erreicht Simbabwe
Mittlerweile haben die Wikileaks-Enthüllungen auch die innenpolitische Auseinandersetzung in Simbabwe verschärft, und sorgen die Diplomatic-Cables für reichlich Stoff in der regierungsabhängigen und der regierungsunabhängigen Presse in Simbabwe.

Starten wir der regierungsunabhängigen Presse:
Demnach hat eine ganze Reihe von Ministern, die namentlich genannt werden, offenbar Gespräche mit US-Botschaftsangehörigen gehabt.

Die USA werden von Simbabwes Präsident Robert Mugabe als Feind abgesehen. Gespräche mit dem „Feind“ daher als Verrat betrachtet, unabhängig davon, was im Einzelnen besprochen wurde.

In der News Day vom Montag 12.9. 2011 heißt es :

Wikileaks diplomatic cables have exposed a long list of senior ZANU / PF government officials, among them Vice President Joice Mujuru, Defence Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa, Transport Minister Nicholas Goche, and Youth and Indigenisations-Minister Saviour Kasukuwere having shared confidential information with American envoys.
Former ZANU / PF Ministers Jonathan Moyo, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu und Damiso Dabengwa reportedly did the same, discussing sensitive issues around the political and security situation in the country.

Auch Armeeoffiziere sollen Gespräche geführt haben

Da es aber keine Protokolle dieser Diskussionen gibt, vermittelt der Botschafter in seinen Cables letztlich nur Eindrücke. Ob die zutreffend sind, kann jedoch nicht geklärt werden, da die Betroffenen alles abstreiten.

Mugabe, der zunächst sprachlos war, hat für morgen eine Sitzung des Politbüros einberufen. Seine harsche Antwort wird nicht lange auf sich warten lassen. .


Zimbabwe Independent vom 9.9. 2011

Kriegvseteranen kündigen Rachefeldzug an
Der Chef der sogenannten War Veterans, Jabulani Sibanda, dessen Gefolgsleute nicht gerade durch Harmlosigkeiten in der Vergangenheit auffielen, hat bereits „geeignete Maßnahmen“ gegen diese „Verräter“ angekündigt.


News Day 12.9.2011

Umgekehrt glaubt die Regierungspresse – dank Wikileaks – einen Journalisten als Doppelagenten entlarvt zu haben, der bei seiner Rückkehr nach Simbabwe – er arbeitet zur Zeit in Südafrika – mit seiner Verhaftung rechnen muss.


Regierungssprachrohr Sunday News l vom 11.9. 2011

Bereits vergangene Woche hatte die südafrikanische Wochenzeitung Mail and Guardian berichtet, wie die ZANU / PF versuchte, sich von Politikern zu trennen, die verhandlungsbreit sind, und im Falle des Todes Mugabes – der 87 jährige leidet offenbar an metastasiertem Prostatakarzinom- eine Verhandlungslösung und keinen Coup anstreben.


Mail & Guardian 9.9. 2011

Die Hardliner in Mugabes Partei haben nun dank Wikileaks das Futter, um diese Politiker kaltzustellen, und können die Cables gleichzeitig benutzen, um Journalisten der Spionage zu beschuldigen.

Wikileaks sei gedankt
Wikileaks hat also – dank der fehlenden redaktionellen Bearbeitung der Cables – Steine unter die Politiker und unter das Volk geworfen, mit der Folge, dass jetzt aufeinander losgegangen wird, ggf. mit Hilfe der Schläger-Veteranen, und der immer gewaltbereiten Jugendliga. Deren Truppen hatten bereits in der vergangenen Woche wieder einmal bei der Parlamentseröffnung durch Rowdytum und Schlägereien auf sich aufmerksam gemacht, und einen Tag später die Händler auf einem Flohmarkt in Harare verprügelt, mit der durch nichts belegten Behauptung, sie würden die Partei MDC statt ZANU / PF unterstützen.

So kann sich dann Wikilekas zugutehalten, gewaltsame Auseinandersetzungen unwillentlich gefördert zu haben.

Bezweifeln darf man , dass Wikileaks-Boss Julian Assange auch nur ansatzweise Kenntnisse über die innenpolitische Lage in Simbabwe besitzt, in die er mit der unredigierten Veröffentlichung substantiell eingegriffen hat. Das gilt nicht nur für Journalisten, Politiker der ZANU / PF sondern ebenfalls für Angehörige der in Opposition zur ZANU /PF stehenden MDC, denn auch deren Mitglieder werden in den Cables gebührend „gewürdigt“.

Mit anderen Worten: Die Auswirkungen der Veröffentlichungen sind Assange offenbar schnurz-piep-egal.

Solch eine Person sollte niemals Zugang zu derartigen Infos erlangen können, geschweige denn entscheiden, was, wann, und wie veröffentlicht wird.

Wikileaks am Ende? Die Idee wird überleben

Zu Simbabwe
link Simbabwe: Beerdigung von Solomon Mujuru – auch Beerdigung der politischen Gewalt?
link Simbabwe: Tod des ehemaligen Armeechefs Solomon Mujuru
link Wahlen in Simbabwe noch 2011?

linkSimbabwe – Der Wahlkampf hat schon begonnen
linkWird Simbabwe den Weg Ägyptens gehen?
linkWohin treibt Simbabwe?
link 30 Jahre Simbabwe, 30 Jahre Robert Mugabe
linkSimbabwe: Mugabes Umzug ins Paradies

afrika

Maghreb: Ziel Europa, Cargo Kokain. Der Aufstand braucht Geld

Stephan Fuchs – In Afrika herrscht Krieg. Libyen versinkt im Chaos, die Korruption steigert sich ins Unermessliche. In Europa werden immer mehr Nordafrikaner mit Kokain von der Polizei aufgegriffen.

Immer häufiger beobachten europäische Polizeistellen, dass Nordafrikaner, allen voran Tunesier und Libyer mit Kokain angetroffen werden. Die Mengen der sichergestellten Drogen übertreffen den Eigenbedarf bei Weitem. 20 bis 30 Kügelchen können zum Teil pro Zugriff sichergestellt werden, auch schon mal Fingerwürste, die aus dem Darm entnommen werden. Bis vor kurzem waren die Nord Afrikaner vor allem mit den gemütlichen Drogen wie Haschisch und Cannabis beim Verkauf aufgefallen. Das Business wurde vorwiegend von Nigerianern und West Afrikanern ausgeführt.

Im Zuge der Aufstände in Nordafrika, werden sie aber zunehmend von ihren nördlichen Nachbarn verdrängt. Der Aufstand braucht Geld. Dazu wird das lukrative Kokain Business immer mehr gleich selber ausgeführt und nicht mehr an die Schwarzafrikaner ausgelagert: Vom Import, verarbeiten, strecken, Vertrieb und Verkauf und der Schutz der Operationen, wird mehr und mehr von Tunesiern und Libyern übernommen.

Die Drug Enforcement Agency DEA verhaftete unlängst drei Mitglieder der al-Qaida Organisation des Islamischen Maghreb (AQIM). Das Trio war für die Sicherheit eines kolumbianischen Kokain Transports der FARC verantwortlich, das über Westafrika importiert worden war und über Karawanen nach Spanien hätte gebracht werden sollen. Es ist gut möglich, dass man in Europa in Kürze einen Verdrängungskampf wird beobachten können, denn es ist fraglich, ob sich die Nigerianer den lukrativen Markt wegnehmen lassen.

afrika

The Nigerian Connection

Juliana Ruhfus – Every year tens of thousands of West Africans migrate to Europe in search of a better life. But for some of them that search will end in tragedy, as they fall victim to competing mafia gangs that prey on the hopes of the desperate. In southern Italy, it is Nigerian women who are among the most exploited, with many ending up trapped in the nightmare world of the sex trade.

In the first of two special reports, Juliana Ruhfus investigates the plight of African women caught up in a web of organised crime, prostitution and people trafficking. In the following account Chiara Caprio, an Italian journalist who was involved in the making of the film, describes what they found out in southern Italy.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

The ghetto of Destra Volturno, an assembly of houses once used by Neapolitan tourists, is surrounded by flowers as it hosts the funeral of Mary Morad, a seven-year-old from Ghana. She was killed by a man with psychiatric problems. But in Castel Volturno, more than one-third of the 25,000 official citizens are African and, in particular, Ghanaian and Nigerian.

Al Jazeera came to investigate the phenomenon of Nigerian organised crime in this small town, quickly forgotten after serious riots in 2008, when hundreds of Africans took to the streets to protest against the massacre of six young Ghanaians committed by Giuseppe Setola, the army of the Casalesi clan.

Mary’s family is waiting for the coffin and tension grows as delays and friction increase. Bose Atta, Mary’s Nigerian mother, who was trafficked to Italy to be forced into prostitution, is nervous. She cries as her friends express anger against Mary’s father, a man from Ghana who is now married to another Nigerian woman.

Finally, the coffin arrives and a group of men start celebrating with a Muslim rite. An improvised march towards the cemetery starts under a warm sun overheating a tormented African community.

Stronger than ever
„The Domitiana crosses Castel Volturno for 28 kilometres,“ says Stefano Ricciardiello, a detective at the local police station, a small and shabby office overwhelmed by new and old papers covering stories of murders, repatriations and organised crime. „The new African mafia’s activities have invaded the whole territory.“

He is showing us along the roads where, one after another, Nigerian women and young girls are waiting for clients.

According to the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), Italy is now the main destination for more than 10,000 Nigerian prostitutes, trafficked from Benin City to European cities and criminal hubs, just like the Domitiana and its coast.

„Nigerian criminals are able to find agreements with all the mafias, from Colombians to Chinese. But it’s an easy game for them in Italy also for another reason: the high number of Italian clients who look for prostitutes night and day,“ says Giovanni Conzo, a prosecutor at the anti-mafia section in Naples.

„This organisation is stronger than ever. We should stop them before they take full control of our region,“ he adds. But Conzo’s words offer just a glimmer of hope.

Using voodoo to enslave
Isoke Aikpitanyi, a former victim of trafficking and now the main reference point for Nigerian women in Italy, knows how this business is managed in Caserta’s area. As she walks in Castel Volturno’s historic centre, she explains: „Today in Italy there are almost 10,000 madams, each one in control of an average of two or three girls.“

Madams are the key, she explains. They are the main actors in this exploitation. They force girls into prostitution and ask for money to repay the debt. They work with „brothers“, men who are in charge of physically trafficking the „babies“, as girls forced into prostitution are called.

But Nigerian human trafficking is often associated with drug smuggling and a distorted use of religious tradition.

The women and girls are often forced to undergo a Juju oath-swearing ritual that commits them to repaying the money they owe to their smugglers on pain of death or insanity.

„The Juju, the voodoo rite, it’s not a bad practice. It was used to bring justice, but they ruined everything,“ says Isoke with anger. „They don’t care how they make their money as far as they make it. They use Juju to enslave.“

Even in this hell, there are people who try not to lose hope. Sister Antonia, a Nigerian nun of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order, manages a shelter, the Casa Santa Maria dell’Accoglienza, launched in 2000 in the Fernandes centre by the Capua-based Caritas. Here, more than 70 women have found a place to stay and 10 children have been born.

„We were called by the bishop of Capua, Mons. Bruno Schettino, to promote these girls‘ integration. They are all former prostitutes. If they want to change their lives, they know they’ll always find a place here,“ Sister Antonia says.

The women can stay for between six months and a year, a period when they dedicate their time to education and „to gain[ing] their dignity back,“ explains Sister Antonia. The nuns give the girls the opportunity to write down their stories and explain what happened and who forced them into prostitution.

„We try to make them understand that Juju won’t have any effect on them,“ she says.

But we met girls who still work on the streets and believe in the agreements they made. Some of them have to repay debts of up to $58,000 and are still terrified of the powerful consequences of Juju on their families and themselves.

In the second part of the special investigation, The Nigerian Connection II, Juliana Ruhfus follows the trail from Italy back to Benin City in Nigeria, from where women, desperately seeking an escape from grinding poverty, are trafficked to Europe.

To pay for their travel, many of them incur massive debts to organised crime gangs in the false belief that a lucrative regular job awaits them at the other end. Often they are forced to undergo a Juju oath-swearing ritual that commits them to repaying the money on pain of death or insanity.

When they arrive in Europe, they discover the only way they can do this is by agreeing to work in the sex trade. A Juju priest who is involved in the trade justifies the use of ritual practices on the grounds that he is offering a service to the community.

But as Juliana discovers, it is not just traditional African religions in West Africa that contribute to this trade on bonded labour. Evangelical Christian pastors have been involved too.

afrika

The Sahara’s new cargo: drugs and radicalism

Stephen Ellis – It is not often that the words “cocaine” and “al-Qaida” are plausibly linked. But these two forces are turning the western half of the Sahara – approximately from southern Libya to the Atlantic coast – into a locus of illicit money-making and radical politics. The development, quite a feat for a sparsely populated region, presents a challenge that the rich states to the north cannot afford to ignore.

A number of incidents in recent months suggest that this new reality has begun to take root. In December 2009, three alleged al-Qaida operatives of Malian origin were arrested in Ghana on “narco-terrorism” charges and sent to the United States under the auspices of the Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA), following a four-month tracking operation (see James M Dorsey, “Drugs Money Fills al Qaeda Coffers in West Africa”, Deutsche Welle, 22 January 2010). In March 2010, a number of al-Qaida affiliates were charged in Mauritania with drug-trafficking offences involving the transportation of cocaine and marijuana.

Behind these immediate events lies a spreading implantation of the drugs trade in parts of the continent. By the mid-2000s at latest, leading cocaine-smugglers in Latin America had begun systematically using west Africa as a staging-post for the European market. This is estimated to consume about 300 tonnes of the white powder per year at present, but it has huge potential to increase further (see Emmanuelle Bernard, “Guinea-Bissau: drug boom, lost hope”, 23 October 2008).

At first, the traffickers’ strategy was to take wholesale cargoes to coastal states in west Africa and stockpile it in places where policing is inadequate and politicians can be bought cheaply. From there, cocaine could be repackaged and re-exported to Europe. There were already well-established west African cocaine-smugglers (with Nigerians and Ghanaians in the forefront), whose speciality had always been to access the European market by sending large numbers of couriers by air, each carrying a kilo or less – the notorious “swallowers and stuffers”. The major west African traders provided local services to the Latin Americans; some individual local traders were taking small quantities overland through the Sahara to north Africa, but there was no real evidence of a wholesale trade through the desert.

The new cargo
The signs of a shift in the trade’s character were evident by January 2008, when the Malian army fought a battle in the north of the country with a convoy of vehicles manned by smugglers carrying no less than three-quarters of a tonne of cocaine eastward. The Malian authorities confiscated the cocaine…which promptly disappeared. Since then there have been in terceptions of other convoys carrying cocaine in four-wheel-drive vehicles from the Atlantic coast of Africa towards the heart of the Sahara. The smugglers are well-armed and equipped with satellite-phones and global-positioning systems (GPS).

They have the confidence to match their sophisticated technology: they have even placed landmines at strategic locations to discourage interception. No one on the right side of the law knows where their cargoes end up, but most probably they go to Libya or Egypt for onward transport to Europe, perhaps in cargo-containers.

An investigative breakthrough came in November 2009, when the Malians found in a remote region the wreck of a Boeing cargo-aircraft that had brought in a huge quantity of cocaine from Venezuela. Law-enforcement officers were shocked: here was evidence of a huge cocaine trade that by-passed the coast completely and went straight to desert smuggling-networks (see Jamie Doward, “Drug seizures in west Africa prompt fears of terrorist links”, Observer, 29 November 2009).

Indeed, the Sahara has always been prime territory for traffickers. There aren’t too many other ways of earning a living there. Until recently the main high-value commodity was cigarettes, hauled overland from the Atlantic coast to north Africa. But once a gang acquires the necessary transport and logistics, it can switch to any cargo; and the rising risks of smuggling cocaine by air and by sea to Europe make it more tempting to transport cargo overland to north Africa and then smuggle it over the Mediterranean (using the traditional hashish-smugglers’ routes or developing new ones).

Who makes the really big profits on the desert-run is a closely guarded secret; but even if the Saharan drivers only get a minor cut, the result is a lot of money in a region that has always been desperately poor.

The Sahara ocean
The Sahara is home to more than smugglers. Today it has also become a focus for the group known as “Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM). This is the new brand-name (adopted in 2006) for the old Algerian Islamist movement, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), one of the toughest of the factions fighting against the Algerian government in an atrocious civil war that lasted through the 1990s and beyond.

The GSPC seemed at one point to have been more or less defeated; but after the 9/11 attacks and the United States invasion of Afghanistan, US generals insisted that the Sahara represented a possible new location for Islamist radicals relocating after being flushed out of their Afghan camps. The generals were later to say that some suicide-bombers operating in Iraq had trained in the same camps.

Most observers were rather sceptical; but there was no doubt that Algerian Islamists had trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and that Algerians were present at the founding of al-Qaida. There were also plenty of radical Islamist preachers wandering through the countries just south of the Sahara, usually with funding from the Gulf states or Pakistan, but there is not much new about this. The conventional wisdom has always been that west African Muslims are dominated by brotherhoods devoted to Sufi mysticism and have little truck with Saudi or south Asian ideas of doctrinal purity (see Sean Hanretta, Islam and Social Change in French West Africa: History of an Emancipatory Community [Cambridge University Press, 2009]).

The idea of the Sahara as a new centre of Islamist radicalism seemed to many people to be a case of American strategists finding terrorists under every sand-dune at a time when the “global war on terror” made this a good way of advancing a military career. The US military set up a series of schemes to train the security forces in countries bordering the Sahara and launched joint military exercises called Operation Flintlock. In 2004, I witnessed US marines teaching Nigérien troops how to clear a house of enemies and practicing with them on the rifle-range.

Yet the big empty spaces of the Sahara have a curious effect of linking places as far away as Darfur and the Atlantic coast. And there’s no doubt that there has been a distinct revival of Islamist activism in the Sahara of which the rebranding of the Algerian radicals as AQIM is just one part. AQIM is more radical and ideological than traditional Saharan bandits. In December 2007, AQIM blew up the United Nations building in Algiers and attacked a law court, killing forty-one people. In the sixteen months since there has been a spate of kidnappings, the beheading of a British tourist, the murder of a top Malian intelligence officer, and more violence besides.

It is unclear what AQIM actually consists of or how it relates to the Tuareg population of the Sahara, which traditionally has had little truck with Islamism. AQIM is said to contain at least three rather disparate elements; these include the Mauritanian Islamists who attacked the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott in February 2008 as well as killing some French tourists, and the remnants of the old Algerian movement (which are operationally rather separate). In between are various more traditional bandits who use the AQIM brand-name but have little ideological fervour.

Some radical groups fight each other for turf, but whether they are AQIM or freelancers is unclear. Some recent reports from northern Niger suggest that AQIM regularly recruits west African migrants who get lost in the desert heading for north Africa. AQIM also encourages others to take western hostages and hand them over. By all reliable accounts, the current situation is a rather mixed picture where politics and commerce are fused (see Philip Sherwell, “Cocaine, kidnapping and the Al-Qaeda cash squeeze”, Telegraph, 6 March 2010).

Beyond the fortress
An additional element is the radicalisation of mosques and universities in Niger and Mali by radical Islamists, some of them influenced by Sudan. The major purveyors of influence in the Sahara, including Algeria’s formidable military intelligence service and Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya, have never attempted to police borders in the way that the US strives for, but tend to prefer more indirect methods of sponsorship and cooptation. The fact that some of the cocaine-carrying jeeps intercepted by Malian and Nigérien soldiers in the desert have been imported brand-new through Algiers suggests that north African governments may be playing a more complex game than appears. There is a lot of money at stake.

All of this cannot leave Europeans indifferent. The Sahara’s status as a transit-route for cocaine coming into Europe makes the region a major security issue for European Union countries. And it was groups with roots in north Africa that carried out the metro-bombings in Paris and the train-bombings in Madrid. Until now, Europe’s main effort in the region has been to stop African boat-people from entering the EU, making the Sahara into the first line of defence of “fortress Europe”. But technical means are not enough. The Europeans need to focus much more attention on what really happens in the Sahara.

Stephen Ellis is Desmond Tutu professor in the social sciences at the Free University Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden. He is the author of Season of Rains: Africa in the World (C Hurst, 2011)

spionage

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part IV

Peter Dale ScottBreivik, Destabilization, Far West, and Global Shadow Elites
Far West is not to be thought of as a localized drug mafia like the Zemun gang, but as a multinational linchpin between organized crime, including drug trafficking, and the global intelligence and corporate establishment. From its origins as a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) group in Afghanistan, with responsibility for narcotics matters, it has expanded globally, and now enjoys connections to the intelligence networks of Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States.”57

In particular, as I wrote six years ago : The group’s business front, Far West Ltd [now Far West LLC]. is said to have CIA-approved contractual dealings with Halliburton for geopolitical purposes in the Caucasus, as well as dealings in Iraq with Diligence LLC, a group with connections to Joe Allbaugh (the FEMA chief in 2001) and to the President’s younger brother Neil Bush. The head of Far West recently told a Russian outlet that „a well-known American corporation… is a co-founder of our agency.“

Because of all these connections transcending normal political and ideological differences, I described it as a “meta-group,” like the drug bank BCCI which was in some significant ways its predecessor.58

Today I would say of my essay that I did not distinguish clearly enough between the Far West meta-group itself and its “roof” or protection, the men it dealt with at a still higher level, like Boris Berezovsky’s man Alexander Voloshin in the Kremlin, or the multi-billionaires Roman Abramovich and Adnan Khashoggi. Far West consisted of a multinational connection of structures and networks in particular locations. Those using and protecting it did not constitute a structure, but a paranational milieu without any single location or organization.

These protectors qualify as part of what David Rothkopf has called the illicit “shadow elites, those whose influence stems from illicit or unconventional means.”59 Such illicit elites are not marginal: Khashoggi, for example, was once called by his American biographer “the richest man in the world.”60 The Russian arms merchant Viktor Bout, who conducted arms deals both with Charles Taylor of Liberia and with Far West in the Ukraine, has been called “the Bill Gates or Donald Trump of modern gun running.”61

In an era when the combined wealth of the 225 richest people nearly equals the annual income of the poorer half of the earth’s population,62 it can be assumed that the power and influence of the illicit wealthy is a major force to be reckoned with in world affairs. And it is clear that some in these shadow elites stand to benefit from the crimes Breivik has been charged with: specifically “destabilizing or destroying basic functions of society,” and “creating serious fear in the population.”63

In American War Machine a year ago I characterized Far West as a component of a larger war machine, and specifically as an “ongoing destabilization machine” whose principal aim in destabilization is not ideological, but “to promote conditions that facilitate its own business prospects…and specifically the chaos that makes for future contracts.”64

This brings us back to Ulemek and Filin, whose connection must have been a matter of business rather than of ideology. Ulemek had been involved in killing Muslim minorities, whereas members of Far West (who included Muslims) were allegedly involved in backing ethnic Muslim jihads inside Russia. But Ulemek and Filin, along with Greger and indeed Breivik, had a common interest in one goal: the destabilization of existing society. Obviously, for their activities, whether paramilitary violence, arms trafficking, or drugs, destabilization is beneficial, even necessary.

Of course destabilization is not profitable to drug traffickers alone. It also generates business for the power bureaucracies and private military corporations whose practice it is to intervene in destabilized countries. And finally it is a source of income to those illicit elites who are themselves safely above drug trafficking, but have become rich through banking the proceeds.
Thus Breivik, who must be condemned both as a psychopathic mass murderer and as a threat to world order, can be seen as someone useful to those whose business it is to profit from the destabilization of that world order.

Behind Systemic Destabilization: A Deep State or a Paranational Dark Force?
The Breivik manifesto and video constitute a veritable cherry orchard of planted clues, from which it is possible to cherry-pick a number of alternative explanatory scenarios. In my own case I have been guided by the need to test a double hypothesis I put forward tentatively in the American War Machine:

1) There exists an on-going milieu that is repeatedly a source for the systemic destabilization in many of the world’s major deep events, and
2) there is a congruence between this dark quadrant of systemic destabilization (or what I once called “managed violence”) and the milieu of the international drug traffic.65

I have tried to show in this essay that the events of 7/22, studied in the context of the Breivik-Ulemek-Filin connection, provide an initial corroboration, at this stage admittedly less than definitive, of this double hypothesis.

There was a time when, citing the facts disclosed about the Piazza Fontana bombing in Italy or the Semdinli bombing in Turkey, I tended to identify the source of all such deep events with the parastatal or “deep state” structures in these countries, including the CIA in America. But in American War Machine I give reasons, not easily summarized, for suspecting that for the ultimate source of such deep events we should look beyond the parastatal structures of nations (including the CIA) to a more unstructured and paranational deep force or dark force, or forces, colluding with, and sometimes perhaps manipulating, these parastatal structures.66

In Moscow in 2010 I was invited to attend an International Forum on Afghan Drug Production. There a senior Russian counternarcotics official, in the course of a long and intense conversation, said to me, “For many years I have been trying to fight the drug traffic, and up till now I don’t really know what I’m fighting.” I replied, “You know, on page 5 of my next book, I say almost the same thing.” (In American War Machine, p. 5, I write that in choosing to refer to the CIA’s global drug connection, I was not trying to define the force precisely, but “attempting to denote and describe a deep force, or forces, that I do not fully understand.”)

The events of 7/22 do not by themselves resolve the mystery of this dark force. But they do help to underline its on-going significance.

I would like to thank those researchers who helped me with this essay, in particular Magda Hassan and Jan Klimkowski of Deep Politics Forum, and Ola Tunander.

Notes
1 Peter Dale Scott. “Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, June 22, 2008.
2 The unsolved mystery of Aum Shinrikyo’s motive for the mass attack is discussed by James William Jones, Blood That Cries Out from the Earth: the Psychology of Religious Terrorism, 77-79. Cf. Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism, 68.
3 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 19-21; Christopher Deliso, The coming Balkan caliphate: the threat of radical Islam to Europe and the West, 100: “Military coups in 1971 and 1980, bookended by chronic massacres of civilian demonstrators throughout the 1970s, were all led by Counter-Guerrilla/Grey Wolves elements. Immediately after the 1980 military coup that brought the Counter-Guerrillas leader, General Kenan Evren to power, American CIA station chief Paul Henze reportedly cabled Washington exulting, ‘our boys have done it.’”
4 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 180-84; Anna Cento Bull, Italian neofascism: the strategy of tension and the politics of non-reconciliation, 112-20.
5 Italian Senate, Parliamentary Committee Investigating Terrorism, 2000; quoted in Daniel Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 14; cf. Guardian, June 24, 2000.
6 Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies, 138-47, 228-30.
7 Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies, 14; cf. 17.
8 Bjoern H. Amland and Malin Rising, “Anders Behring Breivik, Norway Attacker, Returns To Crime Scene For Reconstruction ,” Huffington Post, August 14, 2011.
9 Scott, American War Machine, 187-92; Peter Dale Scott, “A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11,” Flashpoint Magazine.
10 David Rothkopf, Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 289; cf. xx.
11 The lethal bomb attack of November 2005 on a bookshop in the Turkish district of Şemdinli, “initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey’s paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer” (Scott. “Korea [1950], the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11,” citing Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005). Cf. Gareth Jones, “Bombing throws spotlight on Turkey,” Hürriyet, November 20, 2005.
12 James Petras, “The Norwegian Massacre, the State, the Media and Israel,” My Catbird Seat, July 2011.
13 Michael Schwartz, “Suspect in Norway Reconstructs Killings for Police,” New York Times, August 14, 2011.
14 Ola Tunander, personal communication, August 4, 2011.
15 Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies, 176, 181, 183, 289.
16 The term “legend” was popularized by author Edward Jay Epstein with respect to Oswald, in a book with that title. Epstein was suggesting that Oswald’s legend had been created by the KGB for a non-assassination purpose. A CIA monograph by former CIA officer Cleveland C. Cram, “Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature,” criticized Epstein’s book for creating what was in effect another legend: “Epstein, working with James Angleton, was part of a disinformation campaign. Cram writes: ‘Legend… gave Angleton and his supporters an advantage by putting their argument adroitly – if dishonestly – before the public first’” (John Simkin, “Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.”).
16 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
17 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
18 Gore Vidal, „The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt,“ New York Review of Books, December 13, 1973, (full disclosure: I wrote most of the brief footnotes for this essay): ”Although H.H. is a self-admitted forger of state papers I do not think that he actually had a hand in writing Bremer’s diary on the ground that the journal is a brilliant if flawed job of work, and beyond H.H.’s known literary competence.”
19 Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 80-92, 262-66.
20 The CIA also made plans to have the Oswald tape translated into Spanish and distributed through Latin America via one of its radio assets. See “AMCOUP-1 Possible Use of DRE Tape,” CIA Dispatch of December 13, 1963, NARA #104-10018-10074, available from Mary Ferrell Foundation website, “The President’s assassination, of course, gave this radio debate newsworthiness of the highest category.” Cf. Peter Dale Scott, „New Documents.“ Open Secrets, I.6/II.1 (Dec.-Jan. 1995/Feb.-Apr. 1996), 20.
21 It can still be seen on Youtube, but on condition that you first sign up and then certify that you are over 18.
22 The video refers to the manifesto, and both are said to be produced by (in the video version) De laude novae militae Productions. De laude novae militae is faulty Latin copied from an amateurish website description of “In Praise of the New Knighthood,” a letter Bernard of Clairvaux sent to Hugues de Payens in support of the Templar order (TemplarHistory.com: A History and Mythos of the Knights Templar, March 2010, link). The same words, corrected to De laude novae militiae, open the manifesto.
23 Andrew Gumbel, “Seeds of Terror in Norway,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2011.
24 Dana Rohrabacher, “Chairman’s Report: The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?“ December 26, 2006.
25 “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – Yousef’s uncle, then located in Qatar – was a fellow plotter of Yousef in the Manila air plot and had also wired him some money prior, to the Trade Center bombing (9/11 Commission Report, 73).
26 J.M. Berger, “Did Nichols and Yousef Meet?” Intelwire.com, 2004. Peter Lance cites a sworn affidavit from a former leader of Abu Sayyaf (a Philippine group being trained by al Qaeda), claiming that at a meeting he had met Yousef together with “a man named Terry Nichols, who was introduced …as ‘a farmer’” (Peter Lance, 1000 Days, 313; cf. 317). Berger argues that this claim “comes up short.”
27 Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, 146-60; Peter Dale Scott, „Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington’s On-Going Collusion with Terrorists,“ Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, July 29, 2011, http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3578.
28 Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, 193-207; quoting from Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Courses of Action Related to Cuba (Case II),” Report of the J-5 to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, May 1, 1963, NARA #20-10002-10018, 21.
29 Scott, American War Machine, 167-68, 241-43; discussing 9/11 Commission Report, 171.
30 Justin Raimondo, “Anders Behring Breivik, Mystery Man: Following the money trail,” Antiwar.com, July 29, 2011; citing Independent (London), July 28, 2001, link: “Exactly what he lived on in the run- up to the massacre remains a mystery. But his bank details reveal that in 2007, a sum equivalent to €80,000 (£70,000) was added to his account, which would have enabled him to live without having to work.”
31 Raimondo, “Anders Behring Breivik, Mystery Man,” citing Sydney Morning Herald, July 25, 2011.
32 Aftenposten, August 3, 2011, link. Cf. Hegnar Online, 03 August 2011, link. In addition the language of the Breivik manifesto hints over and over at a larger entity behind 7/22 – e.g. „It has been decided that the operation will be effectuated in Autumn, 2011. However, I cannot go into factors concerning why, at this point. My current funds are running low, and I have less than 15 000 Euro left with a 30 000 credit backup from my 10 different credit cards. My primary funds should cover all planned expenses without spending any of the credit.
33 Stavanger Aftenblad, August 3, 2011.
34 “Personal facts about Andrew Berwick (Anders Behring Breivik),” Aufgeweckt, July 25, 2011, link.
35 Scott, American War Machine, 163. This arms supply operation is suspected to have been the work of a network headed by a former Mossad agent in Panama, Mike Harari, who was remembered by some Norwegians. In 1973 Harari, when Chief of the Operations Branch of Mossad, had overseen the botched murder of an innocent Moroccan in Lillehammer, Norway.
36 Barry Rubin, „The Region: The Oslo Syndrome,” Jerusalem Post, July 31 2011.
37 Wayne Madsen, “Israeli Co-option of Europe’s Far-right Political Parties” Rense.com, August 3, 2011: “Although various media outlets, known to bend and succumb to the pressure applied by Israel and its global sympathizers, tried to downplay the connections between Breivik and his allies in Zionist circles in Israel and Europe, no less than the Jerusalem Post, an echo chamber for Zionist and neo-conservative interests, reported that Breivik was ‘motivated by Zionism’ in carrying out his deadly attack in Norway.
In fact, Breivik had a keen interest in one such stay-behind network in Turkey, a network that transformed itself into the Israeli Mossad-linked Ergenekon network, which may still be active against the Justice and Development (AK) Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The German magazine Spiegel has highlighted the growing relationship between heretofore anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi far-right European political parties and Israel’s right-wing parties. Spiegel’s report focused on particularly close ties between Israelis and the Freedom Party of Austria, the National Front of France, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, the National Democratic Party of Germany, the German Freedom Party, True Finns Party of Finland, and the Northern League of Italy.”
38 Quoted in Paul Woodward, “Did Anders Behring Breivik Act Alone? “ Eurasia Review, July 25, 2011.
39 “An illustration of several successful and decisive campaigns: – Serb Volunteer Guard – SDG[1] – Type: Paramilitary organisation – Size: 10 000+ – Garrison HQ: Belgrade – Nickname: Arkan’s Tigers, The Tigers – Commander: Zeljko Raznatovic – Second in command: Colonel Nebojsa Djordjevic Suca and Milorad Ulemek Legija….. The Albanian Muslims in Serbia refused deportation and convertion from Islam (and instead started armed resistance) and as such were targeted for annihilation.” Of those named by Breivik, Ulemek is the sole survivor; Raznatovic (“Arkan”), and Suca were both murdered.
40 Duncan Gardham, “Violent Videos of Oslo Killer’s ‘Mentor,’” Daily Telegraph (London), July 29, 2011.
41 The only exceptions to this style are the stills of Breivik himself at the end of the video.
42 Richard Bartholomew, “Paul Ray Identifies with Northern Ireland Loyalist Groups,” Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, October 23, 2009. Discussed at Richard Bartholomew, “ London Times Highlights Paul Ray,” Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion, July 29, 2011.
43 “Tribute to President Charles Taylor The Order 777,” link.
44 Colbert I. King, “Pat Robertson’s Gold,” Washington Post, September 22, 2001. Similarly Laurent Nkunda, another of the video’s heroes, is characterized by Leana Wen in the New York Times (June 21, 2007) as “an actual ‘warlord’ who is accused of raping and massacring thousands.” Wen heard from a pastor that “Nkunda’s faith at one point seemed real;” but “local churches … were finally convinced that he was the one leading the crimes and atrocities, and his own church ended up excommunicating him.” Wen describes Nkunda as sporting a pin, “Rebels for Christ” – a phrase displayed also in Greger’s video.
45 In addition a video posted by “madnick77” says that Greger himself used “drugs and prostitution” in pursuit of his political goals (“Commander Nick Greger A.k.a Mad Nick / The Order 777,” link).
46 Charles Taylor was less known for drug trafficking than for the illicit traffic in blood-diamonds. Nevertheless when Taylor, a fugitive, was finally detained in a Range Rover with Nigerian diplomatic plates, significant amounts of cash and heroin were found in the vehicle (Sunday Times [London], August 8, 2010). Cf. Mail Guardian [South Africa], December 3. 2010, link: “A leading Dutch newspaper, Parool, carried a prominent news story last Friday linking … Liberia’s current leader, Charles Taylor, to a notorious drug syndicate. “
47 For Geagea’s drug trafficking see Jonathan Marshall, Descent into Chaos: Drug Trafficking and the Failure of Lebanon’s State, 1950-1990 (Stanford: Stanford UP, forthcoming), 131; citing Le Monde, May 19, 1990; Labrousse, La droga, 136-137.
48 For Johnny Adair’s drug trafficking see “Johnny Adair: Notorious Loyalist,” BBC News, January 10, 2003, link; cf. Daily Record, February 5, 2011, link.
49 ”UDA hitman muscles in on Scots drugs racket; Adair lieutenant seeks new patch after failed deal leaves him broke,” link.
50 “Billy Wright and INLA carved up drugs market,” NewsLetter.co, link. A seventh man celebrated in the Greger video, Wright’s LTV adjutant, Mark Fulton, has not been personally accused of drug trafficking. But Fulton’s brother, Jim Fulton, was arrested in California with terrorist materials and drugs for sale, and the whole LTV militia has been accused collectively of becoming drug dealers (BBC News, January 16, 2000, link).
51 “Ulemek Made Industry Out of Criminal Gang,” B92-News, December 17, 2997, link: “Ulemek and Spasojević had some 200 men under their direct control, the state said, and established a drug trafficking monopoly in the capital, as well as in Vojvodina and the town of Požarevac. This monopoly came as a result of a series of murders, starting in 2000.”
52 “Killers of Serbia’s first elected PM jailed for 40 years,” Independent (London), May 24, 2007.
53 Cecilia Ferrara, “Against the Mafia,” Balcanicaucaso.org, February 26, 2010.
54 My interest in Breivik and Far West began after reading the claim from Belarus that Breivik “underwent militant-terrorist training under the guidance of 51-year-old Valery Lunev, a former colonel of Belarusian special forces, who now lives in the Netherlands but regularly visits Belarus” (Yuri Mamchur, “Norwegian Terrorist Anders Breivik Trained in Belarus Militant Camps,” Russia Blog, July 28, 2011.) Lunev was a senior officer of Far West, responsible in particular for Far West’s “strong arm operations,” including the violent coup d’etat of 1991 against Georgian Premier Zviad Gamsahurdia, in which at least 113 people died (Peter Dale Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11”; cf. Link.) The Breivik manifesto does mention travel to Belarus. But unfortunately there is no independent corroboration for the claim of a Breivik-Lunev connection, alleged by a Belarusian politician, Mikhail Reshetnikov, with an obvious motive to implicate the Belarus Government of Alexander Lukashenko. (Cf. “Filin – “El Buho” Is Getting Nervous,” Left.ru, June 24, 2006, link: Lunev “serves in the counter-terrorist department of his [Lukashenko’s] KGB.”)
55 “Filin – “El Buho” Is Getting Nervous,” Left.ru, June 24, 2006.
56 Mats R. Berdal and Mónica Serrano, Transnational organized crime and international security: business as usual? (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers 2002).
57 Scott, American War Machine, 188; Peter Dale Scott, “The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War (Part Two),” Foreign Policy Journal, January 10, 2010; Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group.”
58 Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group.”
59 Rothkopf, Superclass, 289; cf. xx.
60 Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World: The Story of Adnan Khashoggi (New York: Warner Books, 1988). Khashoggi was also listed in the 1992 Senate BCCI Report as one of the “principal foreign agents of the U.S.” (U.S. Congress. Senate, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess. The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, 299; Scott, American War Machine, 160-62).
61 Moisés Naím, Illicit: how smugglers, traffickers, and copycats are hijacking the global economy (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 49; quoted in Rothkopf, Superclass, 218. An associate of Viktor Bout, Oleg Orlov of EMM Arab Systems in Cyprus, collaborated both in Bout’s arms sales to Africa and in Bout’s shipping of Ukrainian X-55 cruise missiles, illegally exported by Far West, to Iran and China (UN Final report of the Monitoring Mechanism on Angola Sanctions, paragraphs 111 – 144, link (Bout/Orlov/Africa); cf. “Filin-‘El Buho’ is getting nervous:” “[Viktor] Bout-Aminov, [Richard] Chichakli, and Oleg Orlov were ‘outed’ in Angola and later in the rest of Africa in 2002-2005. Then Orlov was ‘outed’ in the X-55 affair, China and Iran in the beginning of 2005. As the result, Orlov is in the Ukrainian jail, Chichakli hides somewhere in the Emirates, and Bout-Aminov keeps a low profile and shuttles between Moscow suburbs and Minsk. As to Bout’s and Chichakli’s friend Mr. [Charles] Taylor, he has been apprehended by the Hague Tribunal.“ It is widely accepted that Bout’s arms shipments to Liberia served the purposes of Taylor. But it can also be assumed that Taylor’s coup and arms purchases served the financial interests of Bout, a much more powerful and well-connected figure
62 Scott, Road to 9/11, 254; citing Daniel Singer, Whose Millennium: Theirs or Ours
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
63 Reuters, July 26, 2011, link.
64 Scott, American War Machine, 191-92.
65 Peter Dale Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11”; cf. Link.
66 American War Machine, 2-5, 43; cf. 20-22, 134-40, 239-41.

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part III

linkNorway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part II
linkNorway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part I

Further reading:

linkPart I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic

linkPart II: The Meta-Group, West, and East

linkPart III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
linkPart IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999
linkPart V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
linkPart VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”

linkPart VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
linkPart VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking

linkPart IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
linkPart X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
sendenPart XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic.

sendenLast Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics.

sendenPeter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher.

Unkategorisiert

Hidden Money, Covert Operations

Onlineredaktion – In 1995, then-US President Bill Clinton signed an executive order prohibiting American companies from doing business in Iran. When the decision was made to extend Washington’s unilateral economic sanctions against Tehran, multinational companies bemoaned the move and criticized the policy, claiming that American businesses would be punished for Iran’s actions.

Speaking before the CATO Institute in 1998 as the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney complained about the company’s inability to penetrate the Iranian market: “[This] has to do with efforts to develop the resources of the former Soviet Union in the Caspian Sea area. It is a region rich in oil and gas.

Unfortunately, Iran is sitting right in the middle of the area and the [US] has declared […] sanctions against that country. […] Iran is not punished by this decision. There are numerous oil and gas development companies from other countries that are now aggressively pursuing opportunities to develop those resources. That development will proceed, but it will happen without American participation.”

Just a few years after Cheney’s statement, Halliburton was under investigation for doing business in Iran through one of its subsidiaries registered in the Cayman Islands, a well known tax haven utilized by businesses to hide and protect profits offshore. More recently, Halliburton’s ties to Iran were shown to involve more than just an offshore letterbox business with no employees that exploits a loophole in the US sanction policy that “allow[s] foreign subsidiaries of foreign companies to work in Iran as long as they [are] completely independent of their parent in America.”

How was Halliburton able to do business in Iran through a completely independent company with no ties to its headquarters in the US?

The process occurs through a little known practice in European trust law called Hidden Treuhand, which “submits to legal local customs in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg and Switzerland, but due to globalization, has moved beyond European borders via corporations and individuals, who put it to personal use.”

In a new book titled Hidden Treuhand: How Corporations and Individuals Hide Assets and Money, author Shelley Stark details the history of the Hidden Treuhand, how it operates, who it benefits and its implications for the global economy.

Unkategorisiert

State Department Funds US Group to train troops in Somalia

They shot one of Van Blerk’s South African Bancroft colleagues as well as a contractor from a demining company and 10 Ugandan soldiers trained in bomb disposal. The demining contractor and six of the Ugandans died. Dark trails of blood smear the floor inside the house where the trainer crawled for cover. Another Bancroft employee was shot in the stomach the day before but survived.

On the front lines of Mogadishu’s streets, Islamist militants battle African Union troops. Standing alongside the peacekeepers are members of an American-run team of advisers, former military men who play a little-known but key role in the war against al-Shabab.

Aside from covert raids by special operations forces, the U.S. government has not been involved militarily in Somalia since the intervention almost two decades ago that culminated in the Black Hawk Down battle. But a Washington-based company has been quietly working in one of the world’s most dangerous cities to help an AU peacekeeping force protect the Somali government from al-Qaida-linked Islamist insurgents.

While troops struggle to get control of this shattered capital that has been filling with refugees fleeing famine in southern Somalia, The Associated Press got rare access to the military advisers, providing a first look into their work.

The men employed by Bancroft Global Development live in small trailers near Mogadishu’s airport but often go into the field. It’s dangerous work – two Bancroft men were wounded last month.

Among the advisers are a retired general from the British marines, an ex-French soldier involved in a coup in Comoros 16 years ago, and a Danish political scientist.
Funded by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, Bancroft has provided training in a range of military services, from bomb disposal and sniper training to handing out police uniforms.

Michael C. Stock, the American head of Bancroft, said his men share information with the FBI about bomb materials and the DNA of suicide bombers, who sometimes turned out to be Somali-American youths from the Midwest. Stock said his company receives no recompense for sharing information with the FBI.

Stock strongly objects if „mercenary“ is used to describe his men. Instead he describes Bancroft as a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding permanent solutions to violent conflict. His men say they are trying to stabilize a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war and now a famine estimated to have killed 29,000 children in the past three months.

„We take calculated risks to be side by side with our protegees,“ said Stock, who visits Mogadishu only intermittently and for short periods of time, believing it is best not to have Americans working in Mogadishu. „It gives us credibility with them. They know we know what we are talking about.“

Krieg

9/11 – 10 Jahre danach

Dr. Alexander von Paleske — 10.9. 2011 —- Gestern erschien in der britischen Tageszeitung Independent auf Seite 1 das Foto eines irakischen Hotelangestellten namens Baha Mousa, Witwer, Vater von drei Kindern, der von britischen Soldaten das Lancashire-Regiments im Jahre 2003, kurz nach Beginn des Irakkrieges in Basra, unter der falschen Anschuldigung, er sei ein Terrorist, an seiner Arbeitsstelle zu Tode geprügelt worden war. Zuvor war er noch schwer von den Soldaten gefoltert worden.

96 schwere Verletzungen wurden in dem Autopsie-Bericht festgestellt, und es dauerte 8 Jahre, bis schliesslich eine britische Untersuchungskommission zu diesen Feststellungen kam.

Ein Fall, der bekannt wurde, weil die britische Zeitung Independent hartnäckig dran blieb, anders als Tausende, die nicht bekannt sind. Und der auch nur bekannt wurde, weil daran britische Soldaten und nicht Söldner beteiligt waren, für deren Verhalten es ohnehin keine Verantwortlichkeiten gibt.

Nur die Zahl der Kriegsopfer ist – in etwa – bekannt: es sind mehr als 100.000, aber mit jedem Bombenanschlag steigt die Zahl weiter an…

Saddam Hussein, der Irak-Diktator ohne Massenvernichtungswaffen, der mit Al Qaida nichts zu tun hatte, gegen den der Krieg unter Vorspiegelung falscher Tatsachen angezettelt wurde, weil die USA ans Öl wollten. Und ungerichtete Rache für die Anschläge vom 9 /11 auf das World Trade Center und das Pentagon. Anschläge, die zusammen mehr als dreitausend Menschen das Leben kosteten.

Opferzahl 50-fach
Die Kriege aber, die dann als Antwort darauf angezettelt wurden, haben 50 mal mehr Menschen das Leben gekostet.

Rache hat in der Politik ohnehin nichts zu suchen, sondern es sollten politische Lösungen gesucht werden, wie z.B. die schwarze Bevölkerung es in Südafrika vorgeführt hat. Statt Rache für die Verbrechen unter dem Apartheidregime, die Aussöhnung.
Und so ist es auch nicht verwunderlich, dass Nelson Mandela bis zuletzt versucht hat, er war da schon nicht mehr Präsident Südafrikas, den drohenden Irakkrieg 2003 zu verhindern.

Rache hätten auch die US Soldaten nehmen können, als sie 1945 die Konzentrationslager in Deutschland befreiten, und die Leichenberge und ausgemergelten Überlebenden fanden. Nein, das wurde nicht gerächt, sondern die Alliierten suchten nach politischen Lösungen, nach unbelasteten Personen, um ein demokratisches Staatswesen aufzubauen, und damit letztlich eine Wiederkehr des Faschismus unmöglich zu machen.

Die USA haben, um mit Afghanistan zu beginnen, nicht aus den Fehlern des Jahres 1989 gelernt, wo sie, nachdem sie die Rebellen mit Waffen, Beratern, und Flugabwehrraketen ausgerüstet hatten, nach dem Abzug der sowjetischen Invasionstruppen das Land seinem Schicksal überliessen, und damit den Bürgerkrieg und somit erst die Bedingungen ermöglichten, unter denen Osama bin Ladens Terroristen sich dort verbreitern konnten.

Krieg, keine Aufbauhilfe
Für die US-Regierung stand 2001 nicht eine Aufbauhilfe für das durch Krieg und Bürgerkrieg zerstörte Land zur Diskussion, wie US Präsident Bush gegenüber dem britischen Premier Blair klarmachte, sondern einzig und allein die Search, Kill und Destroy–Mission.

Und mit dem Beginn des Feldzuges in Afghanistan wurde dann auch gleich noch der Irakkrieg vorbereitet, nicht wegen der angeblichen Massenvernichtungswaffen, sondern wegen des Öls, wie der ehemalige Chef der US-Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan, in grosser Freimütigkeit Jahre später zugab.

Ex-Aussenminister Joseph Martin (Joschka) Fischer, der jetzt noch einmal „Mein 11. September“ im Fernsehen mit bedeutungsschwerer Mine scheinbar tiefschürfend referieren durfte, hätte schon im Falle Afghanistans eingreifen müssen. Aber genau das geschah nicht.

Und so kann über den 11.9. in New York nicht ohne das gesprochen werden, was sich hinterher abspielte.

Chance verspielt
Mehr noch: der Anschlag hätte leicht verhindert werden können, wie die US-Zeitschrift Newsweek in ihrer neuesten Ausgabe berichtet.

Titel: The Terrible Missed Chance

Nachdem der FBI-Agent Harry Samit in Minnesota einen Mann namens Zacarias Moussaou im August 2001 wegen Visavergehens festgenommen hatte, ein Mann, der eine Flugschule besucht hatte, klingelten bei ihm alle Alarmglocken.

FBI-Agent Samit roch eine Verschwörung , eine Flugzeugentführung . Er gab die Info sofort nach Washington weiter dort wurde sie jedoch unter den Teppich gekehrt. Am 27. August telefonierte Samit deshalb mit seinem Boss in Minneapolis, namens Greg Jones.

Wörtlich:

„Der Mann (Moussaou) ist Teil einer Verschwörung, die eine Flugzeugentführung plant , möglicherweise wollen die Verschwörer dann ein Flugzeug voll mit Passagieren z. B. in das World Trade Center steuern“.

Auch das CIA und dessen Chef Tenet wurden darüber informiert. Unternommen wurde nichts. Aber Samit gab nicht auf, noch nicht, aber alle seine Bemühungen führten letztlich zu nichts.

Erst nach 9 /11 war klar, dass der FBI-Mann in Minneapolis recht hatte.
Diese Details wurden in dem Untersuchungsbericht zu 9/11 unterschlagen bzw. nur am Rande vermerkt. Harry Samit bekam später keineswegs ein dickes Lob, sondern Schwierigkeiten an seinem Arbeitsplatz,

Dass nach den Anschlägen in Nairobi / Kenia und Dar-es- Salaam / Tansania, sowie dem Angriff auf die USS Cole vor der Kueste des Jemen nicht mit einem derartigen Anschlag gerechnet wurde, überrascht. Offenbar bestand völliges Unvermögen, sich in die Denkweise eines Osama Bin Laden hineinzuversetzen, der von einem grossen Krieg der Muslime gegen die „Kreuzritter“ träumte, und ein Kalifat errichten wollte. Mit ihm als Kalifen versteht sich.

Die Newsweek – nicht nur sie – stellt dann die Frage:

Hat Osama letztlich gewonnen?

Die USA haben zwei Eroberungskriege angezettelt, aus denen sie versuchen jetzt wieder herauszukommen, unter Zurücklassung von Tod und Zerstörung, demgegenüber die Todesopfer und Zerstörungen von 9/11 geradezu klein erscheinen.

Das Schicksal der jeweiligen Zivilbevölkerung war ihnen dabei herzlich gleichgültig. So wie in Vietnam und später in Afghanistan nach dem Abzug der Sowjets.

Verloren hat daher vor allem die Zivilbevölkerung im Irak und Afghanistan, ganz abgesehen von den Kriegskosten, die sich mittlerweile zusammen auf 2,6 Billionen US Dollar belaufen, davon alleine in Afghanistan fast 400 Milliarden US Dollar.

Die Welt nach 9/11 ist „not a better place“ ganz im Gegenteil. Trotz der Tötung Osama bin Ladens.

Zu Joseph Martin (Joschka) Fischer
K(l)eine Dosis Geschichte oder: Joseph (Joschka) Fischers Märchenstunde

Zu Afghanistan
Afghanistan: Frühjahrsoffensive der Taliban, die Bundeswehr schießt auf Demonstranten
Meuterei auf der Gorch Fock – bald auch in Afghanistan?
Abzug aus Afghanistan und Rückkehr aus Afghanistan

Tod in Afghanistan – Undank in der Heimat
Aus der Hölle in Krankheit und Obdachlosigkeit – US-Soldaten nach der Rückkehr von der Front

Afghanistan: Rückt das Ende des Schreckens näher?
Vietnam damals, Afghanistan heute: Kriegsverbrechen und Irreführung
Afghanistan – wann kommt der Waffenstillstand?
Blackwater–Söldner in Afghanistan oder: Mit der Bundeswehr Seit an Seit
Der Krieg in Afghanistan und eine führende liberale deutsche Wochenzeitung
Afghanistan: Milliarden für den Krieg, Peanuts zur Bekämpfung von Hunger und Unterernährung
Verteidigung westlicher Kulturwerte am Hindukusch oder: So fröhlich ist das Söldnerleben in Afghanistan
Keine Strafverfolgung deutscher Soldaten in Afghanistan?
Unsere kanadischen Folterfreunde in Afghanistan
Justiz in der Krise oder Krisenjustiz?
Mission impossible – Josef Joffes Iran-Kriegs-Artikel in der ZEIT</a

Interviews mit Botschafter a.D. Dr. Werner Kilian
Nach der Afghanistankonferenz – Dr. Werner Kilian im Interview
Schrecken ohne Ende? – Ein Interview mit Botschafter a.D. Dr. Werner Kilian

Zum Söldnerunwesen
linkBlackwater–Söldner in Afghanistan oder: Mit der Bundeswehr Seit an Seit
Chefsöldner Tim Spicer erhält Pentagon-Vertragsverlängerung im Irak
Vom britischen Südafrika-Botschafter zum Söldnerfirma-Direktor
linkBlair drängt auf Söldnernachschub aus Südafrika
On The Road Again – Blackwater-Söldner dürfen weiter töten
Irak: Wenn die regulären Truppen gehen, kommen die Söldner
Söldner, Gauner, Waffen und Rohstoffe

Unkategorisiert

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part III

Peter Dale ScottThe Modus Operandi of the Bomb
It has been widely noted that Breivik in 7/22 used the same bombing modus operandi as Oklahoma City and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – an ammonium nitrate bomb concealed in a parked vehicle. As Andrew Gumbel wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Breivik appears to have been more than simply inspired by American predecessors such as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber: The materials he used, the way he planned and carried out his attacks, and his own writings all suggest he was deeply familiar with the actions of some notorious political killers on this side of the Atlantic.

Breivik possessed a Glock semiautomatic, the same weapon McVeigh was carrying when he was arrested by a hawk-eyed Highway Patrol officer 90 minutes after the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma. Breivik also possessed a .223-caliber Ruger assault rifle, just like McVeigh.23

Oklahoma City bombing
The debate still continues whether Breivik himself could have developed the skills to make a successful ammonium nitrate bomb. But there are strong indications that the 1993 WTC bombers and one of the two known 1995 Oklahoma City bombers (Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols) received training from abroad, possibly from al Qaeda.

In the words of Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Nichols’ skill as a terrorist seems to have grown while in the Philippines. Initially he was an unsuccessful bomb-maker. According to Michael Fortier’s testimony, Nichols and McVeigh failed miserably when they tested an explosive device in the Arizona desert just six months before they bombed the Murrah building. After Nichols’ final trip to the Philippines, he and McVeigh were fully capable of manufacturing the crude but deadly bomb that was used to bring down the Murrah federal building.24

Rohrabacher also explored the apparent connections in the Philippines between Nichols and Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qaeda-linked mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. (Yousef is a close associate and relative of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said to have been the mastermind of al Qaeda’s 9/11 exploit.)25 According to researcher J.M. Berger and others, “In November 1994, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef both walked on the grounds of the same college campus,” Southwestern University in the Philippine city of Cebu, where an Islamist cell was active. Later, each man booked a flight on the same airline.26

It is worth recalling that in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center the attackers were trained by a member of al Qaeda, Ali Mohamed, who almost certainly was a double agent working also for U.S. sources. The same trainer “led” (to quote the 9/11 Commission Report” the 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy, and may have trained the alleged 9/11 hijackers as well.27

This continuity suggests that all these American incidents of violence may have been part of an on-going strategy of tension, to destabilize society as a means to justify the ever-mounting budgets for America’s security forces. In American War Machine I devoted an entire chapter to the question whether we should see 9/11 as part of an on-going tradition of “engineered” deep events. (I took the term “engineered” from a U.S. army document stating, “The engineering of a series of provocations to justify military intervention is feasible and could be accomplished with the resources available.”)28

The fact that Breivik imitated McVeigh does not prove that they were part of the same organization. It is possible that Breivik consciously imitated McVeigh, as a way of heightening and shading the aura of mystery he cultivated around his actions – or if you will as a kind of hommage to McVeigh, along with the Unabomber and others I shall name shortly. But I shall argue that Breivik may indeed have been intimate with the arms-for-drugs milieu that can also be perceived in the background of both Oklahoma City and al Qaeda. (For al Qaeda, despite the odd denial in the 9/11 Commission Report, was almost certainly a drug-trafficking and drug-supported organization.)29

Breivik’s Finances Suggest He Did Not Act Alone
Breivik’s planted clues about his finances also point mysteriously to international connections beyond what was needed for 7/22 alone. In this case the mystery of his finances is reinforced by evidence we learn independently from the Norwegian police: namely, that in 2007, a year in which he reported little taxable income, the equivalent of $115,000 was mysteriously deposited into Breivik’s bank account.30 This important clue, not coming from Breivik himself, refers to a time when „Government records suggest that …. his early attempts at business were a failure.“31

Breivik himself has reportedly heightened the mystery behind the alleged “loner.” He is said to have explained to the police that he had ten times as much money (six million kroner, about $1.1 million) to finance his terrorist attacks.32 His lawyer, Geir Lippestad, has added that his planning also involved extensive travel:

„[Breivik] has traveled in many countries in Europe, via car, ferry and plane, said Lippestad. These states correspond to some of those states mentioned in Breivik’s so-called manifesto, which he repeatedly mentioned during the interrogations. According to Lippestad, [Breivik’s] traveling has been directly related to the planning of the attacks, which was most intense in recent years. He has met with an unknown number of people who have helped him to obtain materials, and he also explained that most of the equipment is from abroad. In earlier questioning, Breivik explained that he had six million [kroner] to finance the terrorist attacks.33

An even more suggestive lead to this hidden financial dimension is a statement attached to the Breivik manifesto, in which “Breivik” claimed to describe his irregular commercial and banking activity:
2005-2007: Managing director of E-Commerce Group AS (part investment company – 50%, part sales/outsourcing company – 50%). I converted ABB ENK to a corporation (AS). Total of 7 employees: 3 in Norway, 1 in Russia, 1 in Indonesia, 1 in Romania, 1 in the US. Distribution of outsourcing services to foreign companies, sold software/programming solutions. Worked part time with day trading (stocks/options/currency/commodities).

This was a front (milking cow) with the purpose of financing resistance/liberation related military operations. The company was successful although most of the funds were channelled through a Caribbean subsidiary (with base in Antigua, a location where European countries do not have access): Brentwood Solutions Limited with bank accounts in other Caribbean nations and Eastern Europe. E-Commerce Group was terminated in 2007 while most of the funds were channelled in an “unorthodox manner” to Norway available to the coming intellectual and subsequent operations phase.34

Antigua, a small island in the Caribbean, was noted for its corrupt banks with intelligence connections; it was used for example by BCCI and Israeli operatives in the 1980s for illicit arms sales to the Medellin cocaine cartel.35 Some have seen a possible implication of Israel in this allusion to Antigua by Breivik, an avowed pro-Zionist in his manifesto. The same people have pointed to an article by Barry Rubin in the July 31 Jerusalem Post, claiming that the Utoya youth camp that Breivik attacked (and which had been rehearsing ways to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza) was “engaged in what was essentially … a pro-terrorist program.”36

Finally some have pointed to the growing links between the right-wing parties of Israel and formerly anti-Semitic right-wing parties extolled in the Breivik manifesto.37

In this article I am arguing neither for nor against the possible involvement of Israelis, along with others, in the events of 7/22. I will however argue that we should look for an ultimate source, not in the covert structures of any single state, but in a paranational dark force with the capacity to collude with or even manipulate them.

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part II
linkNorway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part I

Further reading:

linkPart I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
linkPart II: The Meta-Group, West, and East

linkPart III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
linkPart IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999
linkPart V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
linkPart VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”

linkPart VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
linkPart VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking

linkPart IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
linkPart X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
sendenPart XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic.

sendenLast Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics.

sendenPeter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher.

spionage

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part II

Peter Dale ScottThe planted clues for Breivik’s legend
Breivik the man must be viewed as unreliable, and every statement from him viewed with the greatest suspicion. Yet his extensive autodocumentation — by which I mean the Internet manifesto, video, and Facebook page attributed to him — deserve to be assessed carefully regardless of authorship, especially in the light of later statements he is alleged to have made to the Norwegian police. And here we can say that, whatever the truth about Breivik, the autodocumentation shows connections leading ultimately to the shadowy underworld of arms and drug traffickers that may also have fostered al Qaeda.

It is exceedingly common for high-publicity deep events to be accompanied by such autodocumentation, After the diaries of Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged diary attributed to Arthur Bremer (the man said to have shot the 1972 presidential candidate George Wallace, stimulated Gore Vidal to wonder, in an essay for the New York Review of Books, whether the true author of the diary might not have been the CIA officer and Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt (or in my terms, whether the Wallace shooting might not have been a systemic deep event).

Nearby in a rented car, the police found Bremer’s diary (odd that in the post-Gutenberg age Oswald, Sirhan, and Bremer should have all committed to paper their pensées).

According to the diary, Bremer had tried to kill Nixon in Canada but failed to get close enough. He then decided to kill George Wallace. The absence of any logical motive is now familiar to most Americans, who are quite at home with the batty killer who acts alone in order to be on television.18

Gore’s perceptive witticism, the “killer who acts alone in order to be on television,” fits Breivik very well: his documents seem clearly designed to generate maximum publicity and speculation.

Somewhat like Breivik, Oswald left behind him a legacy of autodocumentation, some of which proved to be very suited for post-assassination television. This included, besides a diary and extensive political manuscripts, an audio-video tape involving an ex-Army psychological warfare expert, and expounding his alleged political beliefs. Yet the differences are instructive. Oswald’s autodocumentation of his alleged left-wing identity can be seen in retrospect as false, and probably part of FBI-CIA efforts to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee which Oswald tried to penetrate.19

Breivik’s video appears to express his true beliefs, even though I shall argue in a moment that most of the video may have been prepared by someone else. Yet in contrast to Breivik’s, the misleading Oswald audio-video was aired extensively after the JFK assassination, as part of the propaganda campaign to describe him as a leftist.20 The Breivik video, by comparison, has been downplayed, and has indeed disappeared from many if not most of the web sites where it was originally posted.21

This suggests to me that the Breivik video was intended to capitalize on the publicity caused by his actions, but that the group behind this effort was not part of mainstream western society, and is not currently being supported by those in charge of the mainstream media. I shall suggest shortly that it was designed primarily for a different audience: the world of the resentful who find an outlet for their resentments on the Internet.

What Does Breivik’s Video Indicate? That Breivik Did Not Act Alone
Both the content and the authorship of Breivik’s video remain very mysterious. What seems relatively clear is that it was not composed and controlled by Breivik alone.

The evidence for plural authorship for the video is internal.22 Almost all of the video appears to be a speeded-up version of a text-heavy sequence of stills, possibly originally a slideshow presentation about knights templar and their fellow crusaders. It is clear both that a great deal of work has gone into the preparation and presentation of this text, and also that the text serves little or no purpose in the speeded-up Breivik version, For there are sometimes up to about twenty lines of text on a screen page, of which not more than about four or five lines can be read, even swiftly, in the time now allotted to them.

Otherwise the video is of professional quality, definitely not a home movie. One of the stylistic features unifying it is the steady predictable rhythm in the three- or four-second time-lapses allotted to each still. This rhythm is broken, jarringly, at the very end, when three photos of Breivik himself appear. The first two are presented very swiftly, completely out of sync with the rhythmic presentation in the rest of the video.

I am left with the strong impression that whoever added Breivik’s stills at the end of the video – who may possibly even have been Breivik himself – was not the original videographer or slideshow preparer. It was someone instead with a different style, sensibility, and purpose. (It would not surprise me to learn that there are other discernible and even quantifiable differences between the slideshow and Breivik parts of the video, with respect to such details as light.)

Whoever emailed out the video and manifesto just before the attacks was most likely aware of the massacres about to unfold. And if there is more than one author for the video, then Breivik was most probably not acting alone. For the release of the two documents must be considered an integral, indeed an essential, part of the 7/22 event — indeed the point of it. I shall argue shortly that its aim was not just slaughter but publicity: to provoke a heightened discussion of the issues and promoters of counter-jihad.

Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites. Part I

Further reading:
linkPart I: History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
linkPart II: The Meta-Group, West, and East

linkPart III: The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
linkPart IV: Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999
linkPart V: Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
linkPart VI: The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”

linkPart VII: The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
linkPart VIII: Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking
linkPart IX: Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
linkPart X: Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
sendenPart XI: The U.S. Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic.

sendenLast Part XII: Concluding Remarks: Meta-Groups and Transpolitics.

sendenPeter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher.