Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 18. november
2005 / Timeline November 18, 2005
Version 3.5
17. November 2005, 19. November 2005
11/18/2005
Al Qaeda - The Database
By Wayne Madsen
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/nov10-1805.htm
November 18, 2005 -- Shortly before his untimely death, former
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that
"Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of
international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and
Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied
Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New
Delhi, the Wayne Madsen Report can now bring you this important
excerpt from an April-June 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a
former agent for French military intelligence.
"I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and
Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the
French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan
...
"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They
were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they
introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the
Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted
in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the
information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning ...' If
the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat
i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will
be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in
'Al Qaida.'
"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is
located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of
the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized
system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements.
At the time, the system was more sophisticated than necessary for
their actual needs.
"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the
Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries
attending to access the database by telephone -- an Intranet, in
modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as
some of their embassies in the world were connected to that
network.
"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two
parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings
could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision
file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were
recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat
il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were
kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is
the exact translation of the English word 'database'. But the Arabs
commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for
"base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q
eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida"
means "the base."
"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in a computer,
and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's
secretariat.
"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the
Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills
in Arabic, my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters
seized or intercepted by our intelligence services ... We often got
intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK
or from Belgium.
"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups
in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of
statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or
leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the
media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations,
the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and ... Al Qaida.
"Al Qaida remained the database of the Islamic Conference. Not all
member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and
many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases.
It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this
network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and
business world.
"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for
terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email
of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing
secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with
their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or
in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the
battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue
states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi
Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan,
the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded
or covert messages.
Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's
personal property ... The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were
carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not
international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish
government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the
Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime
Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.
" ... In the Third World, the general opinion is that the countries
using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the
service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US
and other NATO countries.
"Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the
'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups
claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national
armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN
Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real
sponsors of these wars are not governments, but the lobbies
concealed behind them.
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called
Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But
there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the
presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in
order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international
leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this
propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism
are only interested in making money."
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the
system, in December 2001, Major Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by
a secret French military court of passing classified documents that
identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian
agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel's case was transferred
from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified.
Bunel's character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the
system "got him" for telling the truth about Al Qaeda, and who has
actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that
group.
It is noteworthy that the Yugoslav government, the government with
whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared
information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the
Balkans were being backed by elements of "Al Qaeda." We now know
that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the
Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at
Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith.
11/18/2005
CONTRACTS from the United States Department of Defense
Electric Boat Corp., Groton, Conn., is being awarded a $77,000,857
modification to previously awarded contract (N00024-04-C-2100) for
consolidated design agent, planning yard, engineering and technical
support for active nuclear submarines. Work will be performed in
Groton, Conn. (67 percent); Bangor, Wash. (14 percent); Kings Bay,
Ga. (13 percent); Newport, R.I. (5 percent); and Quonset, R.I. (1
percent), and is expected to be completed by September 2007.
Contract funds in the amount of $51,262,015 will expire at the end
of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command,
Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity.
11/18/2005
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