RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, Sept. 26 (UPI)
The retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden contends the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks on New York City and Washington were the work
of renegade U.S. Air Force elements working with the
Israelis. Gen. Hameed Gul led Pakistan's Inter
Services Intelligence during the war against the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Gul serves as an
adviser to Pakistan's extremist religious political
parties, which oppose their government's decision to
support the United States in any action against
Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Gul contends bin Laden
had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on New
York and Washington, saying instead that they were the
work of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service
-- a version of events that has been endorsed by
Islamic fundamentalist clerics and is widely accepted
by Muslims throughout the Arab world.
Here is the transcript of the exclusive interview Gul
gave to Arnaud de Borchgrave, United Press
International editor at large:
--
De Borchgrave: So who did Black Sept. 11?
Gul: Mossad and its accomplices. The U.S. spends $40
billion a year on its 11 intelligence agencies. That's
$400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush Administration
says it was taken by surprise. I don't believe it.
Within 10 minutes of the second twin tower being hit
in the World Trade Center ... CNN said Osama bin Laden
had done it. That was a planned piece of
disinformation by the real perpetrators. It created an
instant mindset and put public opinion into a trance,
which prevented even intelligent people from thinking
for themselves.
--
Q: So you're already convinced bin Laden didn't do it?
A: I know bin Laden and his associates. I've been with
them here, in Europe and the Middle East. They are
graduates of the best universities and are highly
intelligent with impressive degrees and speak
impeccable English. These are people who have
rediscovered fundamental Islamic values. Many come
from the Gulf countries where ruling royal families
have generated hatred by the way they flout divine
law, wasting billions on gratifying their whims,
jetting around in large private jets by themselves,
and sailing the Mediterranean in big private boats for
weeks on end. Osama's best recruits come from feudal
areas that are U.S. protectorates and where millions
of poor people are seeking human dignity. I have even
visited a Christian convent school in Murree, 60 miles
from here, where my 13-year-old daughter is studying.
The young girls there have told me Osama is their
hero. Osama's followers identify with Mujahideen
freedom fighters wherever they are defending Islam and
its values.
--
Q: So what makes you think Osama wasn't behind Sept.
11?
A: From a cave inside a mountain or a peasant's hovel?
Let's be serious. Osama inspires countless millions by
standing up for Islam against American and Israeli
imperialism. He doesn't have the means for such a
sophisticated operation.
--
Q: Why Mossad?
A: Mossad and its American associates are the obvious
culprits. Who benefits from the crime? The attacks
against the twin towers started at 8:45 a.m. and four
flights are diverted from their assigned air space and
no air traffic controller sounds the alarm. And no Air
Force jets scramble until 10 a.m. That also smacks of
a small scale Air Force rebellion, a coup against the
Pentagon perhaps? Radars are jammed, transponders
fail. No IFF -- friend or foe identification --
challenge. In Pakistan, if there is no response to
IFF, jets are instantly scrambled and the aircraft is
shot down with no further questions asked. This was
clearly an inside job. Bush was afraid and rushed to
the shelter of a nuclear bunker. He clearly feared a
nuclear situation. Who could that have been? Will that
also be hushed up in the investigation, like the
Warren report after the Kennedy assassination?
--
Q: At this point, someone might be asking what you've
been smoking. What is Israel's interest in such a
monstrous plot, which, of course, no one believes
except Islamist extremists who concocted this piece of
disinformation in the first place, presumably to
detract from the real culprits?
A: Jews never agreed to Bush 41 (George H.W. Bush, the
41st president) or 43 (his son George W. Bush, the
43rd president). They made sure Bush senior didn't get
a second term. His land-for-peace pressure in
Palestine didn't suit Israel. They were also against
the young Bush because he was considered too close to
oil interests and the Gulf countries. Bush senior and
Jim Baker had raised $150 million for Bush junior,
much of it from Mideast sources or their American
go-betweens. Bush 41 and Baker, as private citizens,
had also facilitated the new strategic relationship
between Saudi Arabia and Iran. I have this from
sources in both countries. So clearly the prospect of
a Bush 43 was a potential danger to Israel.
Jews were stunned by the way Bush stole the election
in Florida. They had put big money on Al Gore. Israel
has given its imperialist guardian parent
opportunities to turn disaster into a pretext for
imposing an all-encompassing military, political and
economic agenda to further the cause of global
capitalism. While Colin Powell is cautious and others
are reckless and want to make up for their failure to
defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War 10 years ago,
the global agenda is the same.
Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is
overwhelmed by demographics. It is a state that was
born in terrorism that terrorized Palestinians into
the exile of refugee camps, where they have now
subsisted in squalid refugee camps, and is now very
much afraid of Pakistan's nuclear capability.
Israel has now handed the Bush family the opportunity
it has been waiting for to consolidate America's
imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the
Caspian basin by extending its military presence in
Central Asia. Bush conveniently overlooks -- or is not
told -- the fact that Islamic fundamentalists got
their big boost in the modern age as CIA assets in the
covert campaign I was also involved with to force the
Soviets out of Afghanistan. Bush senior was vice
president during that entire campaign. And no sooner
did he become president on Jan. 20, 1989, than he
summoned an inter-agency intelligence meeting and
issued an order, among several others, to clip the
wings of ISI (Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence)
that had been coordinating the entire operation in
Afghanistan. I know this firsthand as I was DGISI at
the time (director general, ISI).
--
Q: So how do you read U.S. strategy in Pakistan?
A: The destabilization of Pakistan is part of the U.S.
plan because it is a Muslim nuclear state. The U.S.
wants to isolate Pakistan from China as part of its
containment policy. President Nixon's book "The Real
War" said China would be the superpower of the 21st
Century. The U.S. is also creating hostility between
Pakistan and Afghanistan, two Muslim states to reverse
the perception that the Islamic world now has its own
nuclear weapons. Bush 43 doesn't realize he is being
manipulated by people who understand geopolitics. He
is not leading but being led. All he can do is think
in terms of the wanted-dead-or-alive culture, which is
how Hollywood conditions the masses to think and act.
All summer long we heard about America's shrinking
surplus and that the Pentagon would not have
sufficient funds to modernize for the 21st century.
And now, all of a sudden, the Pentagon can get what it
wants without any Democratic Party opposition. How
very convenient! Even your cherished civil liberties
can now be abridged with impunity to protect the
expansion of the hegemony of transnational capitalism.
There is now a new excuse to crush anti-globalization
protests.
Bush 43 follows Bush 41. Iraq was baited into the
Kuwaiti trap when the U.S. told Saddam it was not
interested in his inter-Arab squabbles. Two days
later, he moved into Kuwait, which was an Iraqi
province anyway before the British Empire decreed
otherwise. Roosevelt baited the Pearl Harbor trap for
the Japanese empire, which provided the pretext for
entering World War II. And now the Israelis have given
the U.S. the pretext for further expansion into an
area that will be critical in the next 25 years - the
Caspian basin.
--
Q: Were you a fundamentalist in the days of the war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan when you worked
closely with the CIA?
A: Not as much as I am today.
--
Q: What turned you against America?
A: Betrayals and broken promises and what was done to
my army career.
--
Q: And what was that?
A: President Ishaq Khan, who succeeded Zia ul-Haq
after his plane was blown out of the sky, wanted to
appoint me chief of staff, the highest position in the
Pakistani army. The U.S., which by then had clipped
ISI's wings, also blocked my promotion by informing
the president I was unacceptable. So I was moved to a
corps commander position. As ISI director, I held the
whole Mujahideen movement in the palm of my hands. We
were all pro-American. But then America left us in the
lurch and everything went to pieces, including
Afghanistan.
The U.S. pushed for a broad-based Afghan government of
seven factions and then waved goodbye. Even in the
best of democracies, a broad-based coalition does not
work. So we quickly had seven jokers in Kabul
interested in only one thing - jockeying for power.
The gunplay quickly followed, which led to the
creation of Taliban, the students of the original
Mujahideen, who decided to put an end to it.
--
Q: What happened to the 1,000 shoulder-fired Stinger
anti-aircraft missiles that were supplied by president
Reagan in 1986 and 87 to the Mujahideen, and that
literally grounded the Soviet air force?
A: After the Soviets pulled out, the CIA allocated $60
million to try to buy them back. This just drove the
black market price up for one Stinger from $100,000 to
$300,000. The Taliban still have about 250 of them for
the kind of situation they face today against U.S.
aircraft.
--
Q: Is the U.S. now your enemy?
A: Is the U.S. national interest in contradiction with
the Muslim world? The U.S. needs oil, as do its
European allies. You have between 6 and 8 million
American Muslims and their ranks are growing. About
the same number in Europe. Israel aside, we are
America's natural allies. Prof. Sam Huntington in his
"Clash of Civilizations" puts Confucius and
Judeo-Christians in one corner, and us n the other.
His prescription is wrong but is being adopted by Bush
43 who has now put 60 countries on his hit list. This
is the diabolical school that wants to launch an
anti-Muslim "crusade." Muslims understood what Bush
meant when he used that word.
We need a meeting, not a clash, of civilizations. We
are on the brink of disaster. It is time to pull back
from the brink and reassess before we blow ourselves
up. The purpose of Islam is service to humanity. The
time for like-minded people to have a meeting of the
minds is now.
--
Q: But you are against democracy, so how can there be
a meeting of the minds?
A: Democracy does not work. Politicians are constantly
thinking of their next election, not the public good,
which means, at best, constantly shading the truth to
hide it from their constituents. Their pronouncements
are laced with lies and the voters are lulled or
gulled into believing utter nonsense. The Koran says
call a spade a spade. It is the supreme law and tells
right from wrong. There is no notion of "my country
right or wrong" under divine law. The creator's will
predominates. All if subservient to Allah's will and
adherence to a set of basic, fundamental values.
--
Q: So what kind of a system are you advocating?
A: The world needs a post-modern state system. Right
now, the nation-state and round the clock satellite TV
lead people to imitate America's way of life. Which is
mathematically impossible. You have 4 percent of the
world's population consuming 32 percent of the world's
resources. The creator through Prophet Mohammed said
equal distribution. Capitalism is the negation of the
creator's will. It leads to imperialism and
unilateralism.
--
Q: So what does this post-modern state system look
like?
A: A global village under divine order, or we will
have global bloodshed until good triumphs over evil.
Islam encapsulates all the principal religions and
what was handed down 1,400 years ago was the normal
evolutionary sequel to Judaism and Christianity. The
prophet's last sermon was a universal document of
human rights for everyone that surpasses everything
that came since, including America's declaration of
independence and the U.N. Charter of universal rights.
If you superimpose true secular values on true Islamic
values, there is no difference. So surely divine law
should supersede man-made law. Islam is egalitarian,
tolerant and progressive. It is the wave of the
future.
--
Q: Marxism also believed that the nation-state would
eventually wither away.
A: Socialism jumped the rails when it was co-opted by
the imperialist Soviet state. Islam believes in
dynamism, Christianity stands for static statism. The
pope in all his pronouncements has expressed a
dogmatic attachment to the status quo. Why are so many
black Americans converting to Islam? Because they are
looking for true equality which they cannot find under
capitalism. Allah has no gender, neither male nor
female. Islam has no indirect taxation in an
interest-free economy. Usury was a Jewish concept.
--
Q: Is Iran your model?
A: There isn't a single true Islamic state in the
world today. Iran has moved forward from its 1979
revolution, but I am not sure whether it's the right
direction.
--
Q: And Taliban?
A: They represent Islam in its purest form so far.
It's a clean sheet. And they were also moving in the
right direction when this crisis was cooked up by the
U.S. Until Sept. 11, they had perfect law and order
with no formal police force, only traffic cops without
sidearms. Now, in less than two weeks, they have
mobilized some 300,000 volunteers to fight American
and British invaders if they come.
--
Q: And you reaction to U.S. demands on Pakistan?
A: If Pakistan gives the U.S. base rights we will have
a national upheaval. And if the U.S. attacks
Afghanistan, there will be a call -- a fatwa -- for a
general jihad. All borders will then disappear and it
will be a no-holds-barred Islamic uprising against
Israel and American imperialism. Pakistan will be
engulfed in the firestorm. So I can only hope that
cooler heads will prevail in Washington.
--
Q: What about the other U.S. demands?
A: Overflight rights are meaningless since the U.S.
violates air space daily all over the world. As for
intelligence sharing with ISI, you can't even catch
your own terrorists. And what ISI gives you will be of
marginal value anyway.
....
continued at: http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg81518.html
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