Letter Never Sent

Stratfor had a good analysis of what they think Al Quaeda is up to. Unfortunately, you’ll need a subscription to read the article. It’s thirty bucks for six months if you’re a student.

Al Qaeda never ceases to surprise. However, when we look through its eyes, we can begin to see the reasons behind its relative inaction over the past months and the reason why it will not take massive risks until it has to. It is building credibility in the Islamic world and creating tension between the United States and Muslim countries.

Al Qaeda has reorganized and redeployed. From its point of view, there is no rush. It will hit when it feels it has the need and ability. If the United States cannot destroy a few thousand men, that will be all the proof al Qaeda needs that Washington is a paper tiger. Survival is the key. The rest will grow from there.

The public obsession with Al Quaeda could backfire just as the article states. So much of a nation’s power is tied up with perception. If the US is perceived as incapable of dealing with this monster they helped to create they will lose a lot of credibility. That may be part of what’s behind the upcoming invasion of Iraq. The US is desperate to demonstrate that it can still blow things up and kill the people they want to kill.

Very interesting article:

The current spy scandal involved a scientist working in a secret research center near Zhukovsky air base, the Russian air force’s top test center, near Moscow. To STRATFOR’s knowledge, this center is designing new air-to-air and air-to-surface missiles. The distinctive characteristics of these missiles include supersonic speed, low flight altitude, new elements of stealth technology and extremely accurate guidance systems. The United States currently lacks a reliable defense against these weapons, and its own versions of the missiles lack some advantages.

Despite the Russian military’s diminishing production capabilities and financial resources, the country maintains design-technology superiority in other areas, such as new weapons systems for both surface ships and submarines. These include new ship-borne cruise missiles and a supersonic torpedo, Shkval, that is unsurpassed in speed and efficiency. U.S. citizen Edmund Pope was arrested and sent to prison last year in Russia while trying to obtain secrets concerning the Shkval from a contact at a Russia’s Bauman Technical University, a leading defense technology center. It is worth noting that Pope was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin after spending only a few weeks in prison, ostensibly for health reasons: Putin said Pope was suffering from cancer, but American doctors who examined him later found no trace of the disease.

Russia also maintains the lead so far in designing anti-defense missiles. In fact, only Russian-made systems, such as the S-300 and its modifications, would be able to repulse a massive air onslaught by hundreds of cruise missiles and bombers, the kind of air offensive favored by the United States. The United States benefited greatly during its air campaigns in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan because its enemies did not have such defense systems at their disposal — Moscow refused to deliver them to Baghdad and Belgrade. Recently, Russian scientists created an even more powerful system, S-400, and are continuing to improve it.

Related:

1. Austin-based Stratfor Attempts to Make Smart Money on Global Intelligence:
   Is Knowledge Power? from the Austin Chronicle

2. CIA Report Blames China, Russia for Massive Weapons Proliferation
3. Moscow politicians and experts believe the U.S. strives to retain its military superiority at any cost
4. Russia protests CIA report that questions Moscow’s willingness to stem spread of dangerous technology

Did you know that the Carter administration spent $500 million dollars to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and thereby to destabilize the Soviet Union. Scary stuff. Essentially, what this means is that this war on terrorism, in case you didn’t know it, is a sick, sick joke against all of us. Not only that, it was paid for with your hard-earned tax dollars. From The Colder War by John Pilger:

Brzezinski not long ago revealed that on July 3, 1979, unknown to the American public and Congress, President Jimmy Carter secretly authorised $500 million to create an international terrorist movement that would spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and “destabilise” the Soviet Union.

The CIA called this Operation Cyclone and in the following years poured $4 billion into setting up Islamic training schools in Pakistan (Taliban means “student”).

Young zealots were sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where future members of al-Qaeda were taught “sabotage skills” – terrorism. Others were recruited at an Islamic school in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated Twin Towers.

In Pakistan, they were directed by British MI6 officers and trained by the SAS.

The result, quipped Brzezinski, was “a few stirred up Muslims” – meaning the Taliban.

At that time, the late 1970s, the American goal was to overthrow Afghanistan’s first progressive, secular government, which had granted equal rights to women, established health care and literacy programmes and set out to break feudalism.

When the Taliban seized power in 1996, they hanged the former president from a lamp-post in Kabul. His body was still a public spectacle when Clinton administration officials and oil company executives were entertaining Taliban leaders in Washington and Houston, Texas.

The Wall Street Journal declared: “The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources.”

From Oil And The Taliban By Edward W. Miller:

“Seeing this destruction and lawlessness,” Hashemi added, “a group of students called the Taliban… (Taliban means student) …started a movement called the Movement of Students in Kandahar after a warlord abducted two minor girls and violated them.” Their teacher, with only 53 students and 16 guns, freed the two girls, hanged the warlord and some of his people. BBC quoted the story… which lead to many students joining the Movement and disarming other warlords. At the time the Ambassador gave this lecture, he said the Taliban controlled 95 percent of the country. “Only a bunch of these warlords are remaining in the northern corridor… The Taliban unified the country, established a single administration, disarmed some militant factions, and eradicated opium cultivation.”

“In 1998, they (the US) sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan… to kill Osama bin Laden… 75 cruise missiles… missed and killed 19 students and they never apologized.” The Ambassador said his country had offered to punish Osama bin Laden if the US gave proof of his embassy bombings. The US refused. They offered to try Osama in their courts. The US refused. Next offered, Hashemi said, was an international monitoring group in Afghanistan to watch bin Laden, also refused. When the US refused bin Laden’s trial in another country, the Ambassador decided the US was “looking for a boogey man,” quoting Gorbachev who said as he broke up the Soviet Union that “he was going to do the worst thing to the United States… to remove their enemy.” Hashemi said Osama bin Laden had been in Afghanistan 17 years before the Taliban existed, fighting the Soviets. “The Mujahadeen were then called “freedom fighters” by Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney, and when the Soviet Union fragmented and such people were not needed anymore, they were transformed into terrorists.”

In recent months, when Iraq and Venezuela threatened to cut oil supplies the Bush administration hinted that they would be looking to Africa and other resource rich countries to come up with some oil supplies. What exactly does this mean? If you’re as corrupt and machiavellian as the Bush administration and the CIA it means guns and death at the hands of American troops to make sure the assorted foreign governments are pliant enough.

In April the vile Dick Cheney presented a report which contained some ominous foreign policy implications:

In essence, the Cheney report makes three key points:
• The United States must satisfy an ever-increasing share of its oil demand with imported supplies. (At present, the United States imports about 10 million barrels of oil per day, representing 53 percent of its total consumption; by 2020, daily U.S. imports will total nearly 17 million barrels, or 65 percent of consumption.)
• The United States cannot depend exclusively on traditional sources of supply like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Canada to provide this additional oil. It will also have to obtain substantial supplies from new sources, such as the Caspian states, Russia, and Africa.

• The United States cannot rely on market forces alone to gain access to these added supplies, but will also require a significant effort the part of government officials to overcome foreign resistance to the outward reach of American energy companies.
  

A few other interesting links regarding the evil and opportunism present in American foreign policy:

1. Covert Action Quarterly: U.S. Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo
2. Covert Action Quarterly: Chechnya: More Blood for Oil