Torture, Rendition, Terror & Oil: A Primer on "Deep Politics"

by Nafeez Ahmed, February 9, 2008

Why is the Obama administration hell-bent on continuing rendition, and covering-up torture? Why are Western states complicit in these illegal activities? How can the systematic perpetuation of such criminal practices under the rubric of the 'War on Terror' be conducted by the very states who claim to be the guardians of 'international law' and 'human rights'?

The practice of rendition, linked inextricably to the facilitation of torture, is an integral part of the conduct of the western ‘War on Terror’, initiated after 9/11. It therefore needs to be understood in the context of western geopolitical, strategic and economic strategies, and their connection to national security policies. Only by grasping this wider context can rendition be understood in terms of its relationship to the logic of current western strategies, which are themselves rooted in longstanding social, political, ideological and economic processes tied to the protection of powerful vested interests. The movement against rendition will be ineffective if it fails to understand and confront precisely these underlying strategies, processes and interests in the context of which rendition is being practiced and facilitated by western states...

Continued...
http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2009/02/torture-rendition-terror-oil-primer-o...

Obama: Regime Rotation

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed - Monday, January 26, 2009

The arrival of the Obama administration will not fundamentally alter the course of military expansion accelerated during the Bush era. The origins of these policies do not lie uniquely in neoconservative ideology. While the election of President Obama may offer new opportunities for progressive forces to delimit the damage, their space for movement will ultimately be constrained by deep-seated structural pressures that will attempt to exploit Obama to rehabilitate American imperial hegemony, rather than transform it.

Indeed, the radicalization of Anglo-American political ideology represented by the rise of neoconservative principles and the militarization processes of the 'War on Terror', constituted a strategic response to global systemic crises supported by the American business classes. The same classes, recognizing the extent to which the Bush era has discredited this response, have rallied around Obama. Therefore, as global crises intensify, this militarization response is likely to undergo further radicalization, rather than a meaningful change in course. The key differences will be in language and method, not substance.

Nafeez Ahmed's books on 9/11 are fine examples of scholarship that deconstruct the official story of 9/11. His first book, "The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001", convinced me personally that 9/11 was in reality not the event that was delivered to us by the U.S. and Western corporate press, fed by Western intelligence agencies. "The War on Freedom" won praise from Gore Vidal, among others. It was published in 2002, and ranks among the first serious deconstructions of the "War on Terror".

In 2005, Ahmed followed up with "The War on Truth", which continued his fine analysis of the propaganda and disinformation that goes hand in hand with the "War on Terror" and delineates an unbroken series of relationships between "al Qaeda" and Western intelligence, primarily, the CIA and the DIA, that continued after the end of the Cold War, and even after the bombing of US assets in the late 1990s.

In 2006, Ahmed published his last position on "al Qaeda" in "The Hidden History of 9-11-2001" (coming soon in softcover from Seven Stories Press);

“It has no existence as an independent concrete entity. It designates a highly developed category of Western covert operations designed to secure destabilization through the creation, multiplication, mobilization, and manipulation of disparate mujahideen groups. The evidence suggests that this was certainly the case on 9-11.”

In this C-SPAN BookTV segment from 2005, Ahmed talks about his research in "The War on Truth" and is 50 minutes of time very well spent.

See also: Ties With Terror: The Continuity of Western-Al-Qaeda Relations in the Post-Cold War Period and Creating Terror.

From 1979 until 2007 ... this amorphous network designated by the term al Qaeda has functioned seamlessly as a mercenary proxy force mobilized in diverse strategic regions in the service of Anglo-American imperial expansionism. It hasn't ever had a break. The extent of it is absolutely shocking ... Western state sponsorship, indirectly and directly, of al Qaeda as a destabilizing force in strategic regions.

Meanwhile, innocent citizens are being killed. They are being killed since 1993 ... yet the policy has not shifted. On the contrary it's now escalating in the context of developling an even more catastrophic conflict with Iran.

This has damning moral implications. It means that at some level, policy makers are morally indifferent to the deaths of our own citizens in al Qaeda terrorist attacks. Other strategic imperatives, such as the control of increasingly scarce energy resources are more important. There has been a shift of priorities, something in the National Security structure, since 1979, has relegated civilian life way at the bottom.

- Nafeez Ahmed, 7-13-2007.

Nafeez Ahmed's talk "Creating Terror" Putfile stream:
http://media.putfile.com/Nafeez-Ahmed---Creating-Terror---7-13-2007

High-quality MP3 D/L from the a-infos Radio Project:
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=23955

In just over one hour, Nafeez Ahmed presents historical context for the "War on Terror" in a talk titled "Creating Terror". This is an excellent introductory talk on the causes of contemporary False Flag terrorism; a historical and sociological analysis that doesn't rely on "blowback", but blends geopolitical strategy and engineered terrorist events into a coherent paradigm of control, manipulation, and purposeful misdirection.

The talk was presented at the Indian YMCA in London, on Friday, July 13th, 2007, where Ahmed has spoken before.

(Continued after the jump.)

London 9/11 Truth double billing 9th & 13th July:

1) Monday 9th July, 7.30 Another chance to hear the sensational
personal testimony of WILLIAM RODRIGUEZ, survivor & hero of 9/11, who
cannot be dismissed as a 'conspiracy theorist' because HE WAS THERE!
Bring your friends who still believe the official story and help give
William a rousing send-off from London as he departs on the European leg
of his tour;

2) Friday 13th July, 7.00 'Creating Terror': a lateral look at 9/11,
7/7 and the War on Terror, with NAFEEZ AHMED, author of 'The War on
Truth' & 'The London Bombings'. An opportunity to take a rain-check on
the WOT on the 2nd anniversary of 7/7, in the light of the latest
extraordinary goings-on in the UK.

Both events are at the Indian YMCA, Mahatma Gandhi Hall, 41 Fitzroy
Square, London W1 (Warren St or Great Portland St tube). Admission FREE.

EDIT: Article updated 8:25 pm Central Time. (In this new piece, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed analyzes the latest foiled "terrorist" events in the UK, and uncovers a familiar series of anomalies. -r.)

Whose Bombs?

© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

How to understand the attempted but largely failed terrorist plots uncovered since last Friday? Police officers on June 29 dismantled two car bombs made from gas canisters, gasoline and nails, parked in central London’s major theatre and shopping districts. A day later, two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee, filled with flammable material, into a terminal entrance at Glasgow airport. The series of attempted attacks follows hot on the heels of an attempted al-Qaeda attack in the United States earlier in June.

The chronology requires further probing, and indeed, preliminary analysis raises some unresolved questions.

"The American empire is imploding and going down, it is already visible before our eyes. The ideological and the political currency and cachet of this government... it's disgraced around the world. The American government is hated more than at any time in my lifetime, so we really have an empire that's in a slow-motion decline and it will decline. My two worries are... they are going to do a lot of bloodshed, a lot of wreckage before it goes down, and that what stands to replace them is the Chinese empire, and the Chinese empire is a lot more experienced than the American empire, which would be rather parvenue by Chinese standards. "
- Prof. John McMurtry.

I've blogged a couple of times now about a forthcoming documentary from the Australian production company, Upstream Media, called Shadowplay. I'm happy to report that Shadowplay is finally coming to fruition due to the dedicated work of Upstream's Gillian Norman. Her long-distance co-producer is Ian Woods of Global Outlook.

Thanks in part to donations from visitors of 911blogger, Shadowplay is emerging as a strong piece with a serious focus on 9/11 and the decline of the American empire.

The Strategy of Tension

We are at War

against International Terrorism,

defending our Values

and our Civilization.

Western anti-terror legislation does not allow the state to be considered in any way culpable for terrorist activities. As far as our elected representatives are concerned, terrorism is a problem of loosely associated groups of reactionary fanatics “attacking our freedoms”. The assumption, never explicitly stated for then it would be revealed, and easily and permanently ridiculed, is that the state is innocent, immune to indulging in such barbaric practices. Written into the rule of law itself, this assumption posits the state as a paternal Fuhrer, a God figure whom we must all entrust our lives and liberties to.

Yet whichever way you look at it, international terrorism has its origins in the state itself. There are many ways of understanding this, but perhaps the most pertinent for our purposes is contemporary history. We don’t need to go very far back either. Only twenty odd years, to the era of the Cold War, when we were also getting Trigger-Happy trying to defend the “Free World” from the “Evil Empire” of International Communism, as Ronald Reagan put it so aptly.

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

Nafeez Ahmed gave an excellent talk last month in London that takes a "big picture" look at international terrorism and 9/11's place in that spectrum.

Reposting from Nafeez's blog:

Sunday, December 03, 2006

Well, it's good to be back online again. And lots has happened since my last post. A few weeks ago I did a talk in Maida Vale, which has been received with some interest in certain circles. Here's a brief description of the talk as advertised by the venue, Islamic Centre England:

"Nafeez will give an introduction into the covert intelligence operations, economic intrigues and rampant political corruption that have dominated Western 'national security' policies since the end of the Second World War. Using newly declassified secret government files and other reliable documentation, Nafeez will reveal the official deceit that justified Anglo-American imperial expansion during the Cold War, post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods. He will lay bare the dynamics behind historical and current US and British militarism, its overarching goals, and the escalating political, economic and ecological crises generated by the current global imperial system."

The talk was recorded in full, including the Q & A session, by the London Sound Posse, and is available online here.

(Streaming here.)

(Edit: looks like Nafeez wasn't on the show today, but Abrahamson was on.)

Alex welcomes Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed the Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD) in London to discuss possible recent false-flag terror attacks as well as new developments in the 9/11 Truth Movement

infowars

Live streams:
http://www.infowars.com/listen.html#gcn

Later Alex speaks with independent journalist, researcher, and the editor of False Flag News, Daniel Abrahamson, to discuss upcoming war games going on worldwide and how they have been used in the past to conceal government sponsored terror attacks.

Whose War on Whose Terror?

In the name of security -- that is in the name of defending our security, the security of you and me, the British public -- the government has systematically erected a vast legal apparatus of social control, which in both principle and practice violates our most cherished and hard-won human rights and civil liberties.

State Totalization

Ironically, the government has quite cynically used the law, to violate the very rule of law itself. The overarching direction of the anti terror and civil contingency laws is simple:

1) broadening the scope of activity of the police and intelligence agencies and their ability to not only monitor individuals in both their public and private lives; but also proliferating the array of instruments and pretexts available to them to take punitive action, be it through indefinite detention; obtaining convictions using so-called ‘secret’ evidence whose validity cannot be impartially assessed; deportation; the appropriation of private property, at will, in conditions deemed by the government to constitute civil emergencies, etc.

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM: THE SECRET HISTORY -- 9/11, 7/7, AND BEYOND.

Lecture by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006)

Sunday 12th November 2006

Starts at 18:00hr.

Venue: Islamic Centre of England, 140 Maida Vale, London W1 9QB Tel 020 76045500 [Nearest Tube Station, Kilburn on Bakerloo line]

Nafeez will give an introduction into the covert intelligence operations, economic intrigues and rampant political corruption that have dominated Western "national security" policies since the end of the Second World War. Using newly declassified secret government files and other reliable documentation, Nafeez will reveal the official deceit that justified Anglo-American imperial expansion during the Cold War, post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods. He will lay bare the dynamics behind historical and current US and British militarism, its overarching goals, and the escalating political, economic and ecological crises generated by the current global imperial system.

Pakistan and the Terror Nexus

Poor old General Musharraf. His PR trip trying to rehabilitate the image of Pakistan around the world appears to have been slightly scuppered by the leak of the now widely-reported UK Defence Academy paper. Notwithstanding the predictable chorus of denial from the corridors of power, namely, from those who for all intents and purposes stand accused (at the current time Musharraf, Blair, Bush, etc.), the leaked report is entirely consistent with a wealth of evidence in the public record.

The leaked report, authored by a British intelligence official with a military background, is based on interviews with Pakistani Army officers and academics. BBC News has flagged-up one of the most important sections of the document, which says:

The Army's dual role in combating terrorism and at the same time promoting the MMA and so indirectly supporting the Taliban (through the ISI) is coming under closer and closer international scrutiny. Pakistan is not currently stable but on the edge of chaos.

[The West has] turned a blind eye towards existing instability and the indirect protection of Al Qaeda and promotion of terrorism.

Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism - whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The US/UK cannot begin to turn the tide until they identify the real enemies from attacking ideas tactically - and seek to put in place a more just vision. This will require Pakistan to move away from Army rule and for the ISI to be dismantled and more significantly something to be put in its place.

Musharraf knows that time is running out for him...

Continued...

(This essay was originally submitted as part of the record for Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s congressional briefing; “The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later, A Citizens' Response: Did the Commission Get it Right?”, re-published with permission of the author. Download the complete transcript and submitted written material from McKinney’s briefing here; 2.5 MB PDF)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

© Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

An accurate understanding of the history of US relations with the Afghan mujahideen who went on to join al-Qaeda’s international terrorist network is crucial to understanding the anatomy of international terrorism today.

"What the 9/11 Families are Saying"

Friday, September 15, 2006

One of the things that really bothers me is the marginalization of the 9/11 families, the people who lost their loved ones in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Not only have the families, and their call for an investigation even now, been marginalized by the Bush administration; they have also been marginalized by the 9/11 "truth" movement which has largely shown little interest in what the families have been saying.

More than anyone, it's been the 9/11 families who have been at the forefront of the ongoing campaign for an independent public inquiry into the attacks that might truly hold the authorities to account, and result in full disclosure of what happened, how and why. Indeed, one of the most powerful resources demonstrating how little we really know about 9/11 comes in the form of the huge list of 9/11 Unanswered Questions on the website of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Independent Commission. In all, there are, I believe, several hundred questions pertaining to virtually every single dimension of the terrorist attacks. (NOTE: by the way, when I cited 9/11 widow Lauri van Auken in my article below "Interrogating 9/11", although she spoke on behalf of many 9/11 families, she did not speak on behalf of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee as the latter had been disbanded in January 2005 already)

Interrogating 9/11

by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed

Five Years On, Being a Sceptic Doesn’t Automatically Mean You’re A Lunatic… Although It Might Do

Five years after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that shook the world, scepticism about the Bush administration account of what happened, as well as of the “War on Terror” in general, has increased exponentially. This has accompanied the emergence of all kinds of pet theories about what happened, some of them truly bizarre, others intriguing but vacuous, and perhaps a few based on compelling facts.

For someone not familiar with these theories, it’s difficult to know where, and why, to start. And particular variants of 9/11 “truth”, such as the “no planes” theory that the whole event was merely an audiovisual technicolor chimera concocted on our TV screens, don’t help.

But is it all just a pile of lunacy? If only it was, I could sleep much better at night. Unfortunately, beneath the mountain of theories and speculations, there remain disturbing and persistent anomalies that have yet to be resolved. In this respect, the mainstream media’s approach to criticism of the 9/11 official narrative has been wanting in the extreme, focusing largely on bizarre pet theories and fringe speculations, suggesting that anybody who has doubts about the official story must be delusional, dumb, or both.

US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map to Stave-off Looming Global Meltdown

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

http://www.opednews.com

In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.

Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East

Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavour designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."

Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own." Among his proposals are the need to establish "an independent Kurdish state" to guarantee the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: "A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan."