TMR
160: Adeyinka Makinde: Can the British State Convict itself? (Part Two: “Rendition”
& “The Troubles”)
PART
2
The second part of a
wide-ranging nterview with Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed about my proposed
paper, “Can the British State Convict itself?” This segment looked at Britain’s
role in the American-led extraordinary rendition of Islamist terror suspects
involving the former foreign secretary Jack Straw and the former head of
counter-intelligence at MI6, Mark Allen and Britain’s counter-insurgency
strategy in Northern Ireland which was initiated in the early 1970s by the then
Brigadier Frank Kitson.
Julian
Charles: Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot Com coming to you as usual from
the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK, and very
straightforwardly this week we’re going to be listening to the second part of
my interview with the lawyer and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde on the
subject of his forthcoming academic paper, “Can the British State Convict
Itself?” Now in the first part last week, we talked about then U.K. Prime Minister
Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in
2003, and also we talk about the fact that a good deal of legal opinion
considered that decision to have involved participation in a conspiracy to wage
an aggressive war in contravention of established international criminal law.
Well, in this second part now we go on to discuss Britain’s role in the U.S.-led
so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’ of Islamist terror suspects and consider to
what extent former U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was involved in that, and,
indeed, the former head of counter-intelligence at MI6 Mark Allen. And we end
with a look at Britain’s counter-insurgency strategy in Northern Ireland which
was initiated in the early 1970s by then Brigadier Frank Kitson. Of course, if
you haven’t heard the first part, I do highly recommend that you go back and
listen to that before listening to this part, not only because that discussion
about the Iraq War and Tony Blair was very interesting in its own right, but
because Adeyinka gives some very important background to all this about
international and U.K. domestic law, which I think helps to frame the whole
discussion, so please do go back and listen to that first part if you haven’t
read it already. So as I say, in this part we move on to questions surrounding
rendition and also the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland and continue to ask that
question, can the British state convict itself? O.K, so I’d like briefly to
look at the other couple of examples. We took a long time –I thought this was
going to be a very interesting in-depth conversation- I hope you don’t mind.
TMR
159: Adeyinka Makinde: Can the British State Convict Itself? (Part One: Tony
Blair & Iraq)
PART
1
The first part of a wide-ranging
interview with Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed about my proposed paper, “Can
the British State Convict Itself?” This
segment focused on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to take Britain to war against
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, the circumstances of which much considered legal
opinion has equated to have involved participating in a conspiracy to wage an
aggressive war in contravention of established international criminal law.
Julian
Charles: Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot Com coming to you after a break
of several weeks of ‘maternity leave’ as I’ve been calling it after the arrival
of our new baby- coming to you from the depths of the Lancashire countryside
here in the UK, and today I’m very pleased to welcome to the programme the
lawyer and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde for a discussion on his soon to
be published article with the intriguing title “Intelligence Accountability: Can
the British State Convict Itself?” Adeyinka trained for the law as a barrister;
he lectures in criminal law and public law at a university in London, here in
the UK and has an academic research interest in intelligence and security
matters. He writes on international relations, politics and military history,
and has been a programme consultant and expert commentator for the BBC World
Service Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia. Adeyinka,
thank you very much indeed for joining us on the programme.
TMR
198: Adeyinka Makinde: Russia and Britain: An Enduring But Fruitless Rivalry
A wide-ranging interview with Julian
Charles of The Mind Renewed about my essay, “Russia and Britain: An Enduring
But Fruitless Rivalry”. The article posits the chronology of Anglo-Russian
relations as a recurring clash of civilisatisions which has been fuelled by
cultural differences, imperial ambition and ideological antagonism. But it is a
relationship, I argue, that could be changed for the better if Britain opted
out of the United States-led geo-strategy aimed at aggressively maintaining
American global hegemony. Britain should instead embrace the idea of
multi-polarity through which it could serve as a bridge between the West and a
surgent Eurasian new world order within which Russia is destined to be a key
player.
Julian Charles: Hello
everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot
Com coming to you as usual from the depths of the Lancashire countryside
here in the UK, and today I’m delighted to welcome back yet again the lawyer
and university lecturer Adeyinka Makinde, who has joined us a couple of times
in the past to discuss various things of geopolitical and historical interest
and importance. Adeyinka trained for the law as a barrister. He lectures in criminal
law and public law at a university in London, and has research interests in
intelligence and security matters. He is regularly published online writing on
international relations, politics and military history, and has served as a
programme consultant and provided expert commentary for BBC World Service
Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia. Adeyinka, thanks very
much for coming back to The Mind Renewed, great to speak to you.
TMR
181: Adeyinka Makinde: The Pan-Islamic Option (Part Two: The Historical
Background)
PART
2
The
second part of an extensive interview with Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed
about my essay, “The Pan-Islamic Option: The West’s Part in the Creation and
Sustaining of Islamist Terror”. This segment focused on the historical origins
of Western use of Islam as a factor in war, looking at Germany in Wilhelmine
and Nazi eras, Britain from the First World War onwards and the United States’
enduring relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and its inadvertent
contribution to the rise of global jihadism through its support for the
anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan. It also refers to the situations where
Islamists who have been given protection by Western state intelligence bodies
have gone on to commit acts of terror. It invites listeners to consider whether
the many instances of such occurrences are down to negligence or something more
sinister.
Julian
Charles: Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot Com coming to you as usual from
the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK, and today as promised,
here is the second and final part of my interview with Adeyinka Makinde. And
just in case you didn’t hear the first part last week, let me just introduce my
guest: Adeyinka Makinde. Adeyinka trained as a barrister and is a lecturer in
criminal law and public law at a university in London. His research interests are
in intelligence and security matters. And he is regularly published online and
has served as a programme consultant for BBC World Service Radio, China Radio
International and the Voice of Russia. Now of course if you didn’t hear that
first part, I highly recommend that you do, because obviously the two parts are
a whole and references are made in the second part and depend on one having
listened to the first part. So please do go back and listen to that one if you
already haven’t heard it. So in the first part we spoke about more recent years
as we were talking about Adeyinka’s recent essay “The Pan-Islamic Option: The
West’s Part in the Creation and Sustaining of Islamic Terror.” In the second
part we turn our attention to the slightly more distant past –slightly more
distant- and discuss some of the indications earlier in the 20th
century of the West’s use, and to some extent, the West’s manufacture of
violent Islamism for its own various geopolitical agendas. So we pick up there
with the question I left hanging in the air last time. And one of the first
places you go to in your discussion is Germany. You start by looking at
Heinrich Himmler giving a 1944 speech where he is basically saying that Islam
is ideal. “If you’re going to be a soldier, well, why not be an Islamist. And
you also go back to Kaiser Wilhelm’s views of Muslims as “good for guerrilla
warfare.” So do you want to tell us about Germany’s cultivation of Islamism for
the purposes of war?
JC:
He
straddles both of those periods of history of the First World War and Second
World War.
AM:
Yes.
JC:
Was it he who was suggesting…you talk about pamphleteering; I think this was
during Wilhelm’s time, to actually pamphleteer Muslims in British territories,
and to actually incite them to form rebel cells and go out and kill Europeans
in the name of Jihad. Was it his idea, do you think?
AM:
The
basic idea was his. Later on a policy was formulated. What he contributed to it
and what he didn’t may be murky. But what did happen afterwards was a man named
Oskar von Niedermayer, who was a soldier, he was an academic and a spy par
excellence, led this contingent of Germans –along with the Ottomans, or these
people who represented the successors of the Ottomans, known as the Young Turks
who had seized power- on an expedition to Afghanistan, and the idea was to
foment revolution. And part of the whole plan was apart from getting
Afghanistan, which was a British protectorate to rebel, along that line were
Turkey, where I said previously in regard to the contemporary circumstances of
the Erdogan government, Turkey also had that pan-Turkic Dream, and they went
along with it. The idea was, as you’ve correctly quoted was that they would
create these bands of Muslim assassins who would set upon expatriate Western
Christians to kill them or rise up against them in a way as occurred during the
St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. It would be happening in areas of the Balkans
through to Central Asia –all those areas that were within the British Empire;
Muslim communities governed by the British Empire and in outlying areas. But
there were problems with the logistics and the overall planning. It was all
very well for the Germans to understand the Mohammedan faith to be one that was
very stringent and aggressive. But it was another thing to understand the
complexities of the different communities. For instance, they didn’t seem to
factor in the difference between Sunnis and Shias. Who was going to obey that
order? Would an imam from a different sect instruct another? Most unlikely.
Also, if you do start that sort of insurrection, what’s there to tell the
difference between a white Western European who is French or British from your
Germanic allies? So it wasn’t particularly well-thought out. And in that
battle, it has to be said, there was a parallel plan -which obviously won out-
by the British through the personage of Lawrence of Arabia. But Oskar von
Niedemayer was an extraordinary individual despite that failure. A number of
the photographs he took on his lengthy journey all the way through Persia and
Afghanistan are now UNESCO heritage photographs. He lost out and what basically
happened it turned out that when he got to Afghanistan, the Emir kept him and
his party waiting, the British upped the amount of money they paid to the Emir,
because the Germans were offering him a certain amount of money. And when the
British heard of that, they just upped their offer to him, and that was the end
of that. But they (the Germans) did try, and if you recall they were to a
certain extent successful when it came to Russia by using Bolshevism; you know,
Lenin and the sealed train.
JC:
Yes, you do mention that. I’ve heard that and I don’t really know too much of
the detail of that. Not just him (Lenin), but I believe other revolutionaries
were given safe passage across Germany to cause trouble essentially?
AM:
Absolutely, it was part of this policy called revolutionspolitikthat was
used to foment revolution in Russia. And the Bolsheviks did eventually seize
power resulting in a lull in the fighting on Germany’s eastern front and the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty and also the Ukraine. That wasn’t too successful, but
Germany did declare the first modern Ukrainian state. Those actually came
later. The blueprint was what we’re talking of about using weaponised Islamists
to foment unrest in areas controlled by or adjoining the British Empire. It was
a real geo-strategic policy. And before we move on, it is worth talking about
‘blowback’ which will feature in each of these adventures in Libya, in Syria,
in Afghanistan –Operation Cyclone. The blowback was that Bolshevism was successfully
established in Russia, but what happened later on was that Stalinist Russia;
the Soviet Union, was the power that defeated Germany in the Second World War.
JC:
Yes, we will come back to this notion of blowback. Of course, it depends on
which angle you’re coming at. I mean when we talk about blowback I regard to
terrorism happening in the West as a consequence of warfare in the Middle East,
that can be criticised as an analysis if it taken in a one-dimensional way that
every terrorist attack is as a result of blowback, because it can obscure
deeper questions you are asking in this very piece itself as to what extent
intelligence agencies themselves may be actually involved in abetting some of
these acts. So if we put everything down to blowback, that can obscure that and
this is what Tom Secker criticises about relying on that explanation entirely.
Maybe we’ll come back to that in a bit. When we turn back to Heinrich Himmler,
I wasn’t aware of just how many Muslim soldiers he’d managed to build into
these SS divisions. It was hundreds of thousands, apparently. I didn’t realise
that it was anything like that.
AM:
Yes, I think those who have studied the Third Reich even in a cursory manner
may be aware of a picture of these Bosnian Muslim soldiers with Fezzes and they
are reading a book in German. Its translation is Judaism and Islam. Himmler was
interested in Islam in the sense that Islam was this practical religion which a
soldier could understand. What are you dying for? Of course, the Nazis were about
the expansion of German territory, German glory, getting rid of the Bolsheviks;
that sort of thing. But what do you get in return? And certainly for someone
who is about to die, that is a very important consideration. And I think what
Himmler was doing was contrasting Christian theology with the Islamic one.
People are now familiar with the promise of 72 virgins for the soldier who dies
in the cause of spreading Islam.
JC: But
there is an inherent weakness there it seems to me that can be exploited. It
seems to me that what we’re discussing here is the rather cynical exploitation
of that weakness within Islam. You say that’s something that can be debated at
the beginning of your essay in fact.
AM:
Yes, in terms of Islam as a religion as a whole. But the issue of how it
affects a soldier; motivates them, I think what Himmler was thinking about was
the paganism he hoped to impose on Germany over the course of time and I think
that he realised that it would take a lot of time for Catholicism and Protestantism
to die out. But they wanted it (Christianity) supplanted, and that aspect of
Islamic religious ideology was in sync with Norse mythology. In Norse mythology
you have the valkyries who select who will live and who will die in battle, and
these maidens will take those dead to Valhalla; the preserve of the god Odin.
In fact, there is a painting of Otto von Bismarck, the creator of the Prussian
Empire, The Apotheosis of Bismarck
where you see him being carried into the heavens by these maidens or valkyries.
JC:
Yes, the Nazis did have an eye for mythology and how useful it could be in
their aims.
AM:
Absolutely. And congruent to that was that another half of the dead soldiers
would be under the preserve of the goddess Freyja, who had this great field for
the martyred soldiers in the Folkvangr,
that is the “great field (of armies). And she’s the goddess of sex, beauty,
fertility, so Himmler could see that congruence with Islamic theology and the
way it could motivate soldiers. I must say that both Hitler and Himmler
–particularly when the war was coming to an end- did ruminate on whether they
could have used more Muslim soldiers, because there was a feeling that they did
not use them enough in North Africa and as they approached the Caucuses. In
their racial thinking, they referred to Christianity as basically an off-shoot
of Judaism in regard to which they obviously had an antipathy. They felt it
(Christianity) was weak. Hitler and Himmler actually felt that it would have
been a good idea to have had Europe Islamicised and that the spread of Islam
should not have been stopped at the Battle of Tours. They felt it was this
practical religion that met the daily needs of not just the society, but the
soldier in battle.
JC:
Fascinating. What role do you think this guy called Mohammed Amin al-Husseini
played in all this? He was the first Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. I understand
that he was onboard with the Nazis because of his anti-Semitism etcetera, and
he and spoke with Hitler and Himmler, and out of that came this mass
recruitment of Muslim soldiers. What kind of impact do you think he had on that
kind of thinking that you were just talking about?
AM:
I’m not aware of how much it was. He certainly did go to the Germans
essentially on the premise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. We have to
remember that although the insurgents in Palestine who were fighting for a
Jewish state decided to ceasefire and join the British Army, some elements in
Zionism were equally minded to join forces with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
This is Yair Stern of the infamous Stern Gang. So all these issues do factor in
there. But I’m not too knowledgeable about what impact the Mufti practically
had, but the Germans certainly in the First World War and in the Second World
War did establish these camps for Islamic soldiers where their needs were
catered to; both dietary and religious, and they were trained to serve within
the ranks of the German armed forces.
JC:
It’s fascinating and complicated –one has to qualify everything that’s said.
Let’s turn to Britain then. You’ve got some examples of British use and indeed
cultivation of Islamic forces during the days of empire, and while I was
looking at the background of this I turned to Mark Curtis’ book Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with
Radical Islam, which I recommend for a catalogue of examples that are very
well documented and articulated. I haven’t yet finished reading it, but I’m
finding it compelling. So you mention the Ikwan Army under Ibn Saud, who I
believe became the first king of Saudi Arabia, and the British made use of this
Ikwan Army to weaken the Ottoman’s hold on the Arabian area, and that the
British did that inspite of Churchill’s description of these people as
“bloodthirsty”, “intolerant”, “austere” and the quotation goes on “as an
article of duty and an article of faith to kill all who do not share their
opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children, but Churchill says,
“That’s fine, we’ll use them”.
AM:
Absolutely. The British did use two distinct forces in the Arabian Peninsula.
One was Ibn Saud. And the Ikwan, given their ruthlessness, were absolutely
effective. They were made for purpose for what Britain wanted to achieve, that
is, the defeat and dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire. The other person who
was involved was the Sharif of Mecca. His name was Hussein bin Ali. And just to
fast forward slightly, Hussein bin Ali was the (great) grandfather of King
Hussein of Jordan. So the long story was that the British who did use the Ikwan
and Ibn Saud’s forces to pacify that region effectively rewarded him with this
new nation state which bore his name. But they also hedged their bets on the
alternative man, Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca -the Hashemite family- and they
were eventually defeated by Ibn Saud and chased to Jordan and Iraq where they
formed the royal families. But again it shows you how these Islamic ideologues
can be used for military purposes. I mean they weren’t going about (things) in
the manner General Clark would describes things: “Let’s get recruitment on
here”; no, your best bet was to go for those who are the most fanatical. And of
course, one distinction which could be made between Ibn Saud and Hussein was
that Ibn Saud was a Wahhabist, and they have a particularly puritan
understanding of Islam, and indeed that ideology forms the underpinnings of
what we understand to be global Islamist terror in this day and age. We can
trace that ideology to Ibn Saud’s use of the Ikwani as soldiers against the
Ottomans in Britain’s interest.
JC:
Yes, and I think that you having said what you’ve just said there, people would
–some people anyway, probably not listening to this programme- but some people
would be surprised to hear Churchill apparently later writing “my admiration
for him...” –that is, Ibn Saud- “…was deep because of his unfailing loyalty to
us.”
AM: Of
course! If you do the bidding for a particular power, that’s wanted. They want
practical, straightforward allies, or better, vassals to do their bidding, and
that is what British hegemony was about, and what the new American imperium
that started in the second half of the 20th century was all about
and continues to be all about until this very day. They are useful soldiers,
and as we’ve seen –not to trivialise it- almost like a travelling show. They’ve
been in Chechnya, then sent to Libya, from Libya they were transferred to Syria
where there is a stalemate and they are being defeated. But the idea was that
after Syria, they would be transferred to Central Asia to harass the borders of
the Russian Federation and also China’s Muslim population (would be used to
foment unrest).
JC:
How does the Muslim Brotherhood fit into this story? Their name crops up fairly
frequently, but I find them confusing as an organisation. My understanding is
that they were founded in the late 1920s in Egypt. They are a pan-Islamic, not
nationalist. They are a Sunni organisation and at least officially renounce
violence but are considered a terrorist organisation by various countries, but
I understand not by the US or the UK. But they have this kind of ambivalent
relationship with the British Empire, but they did have some sort of
relationship with the British very soon after their founding in the late 1920s.
What was that relationship like?
AM:
That’s absolutely correct. I am not a major expert on that, but in terms of the
train of events; they have been relatively consistent allies of British
intelligence and the deep state. The only interval was when you had the Arab
revolt in Palestine between 1936 and 1939. But other than that, there has been
this relationship that has fed in at various times. At the beginning in the
1920s and 30s, it was about using the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of keeping
order in the areas that Britain had acceded to after the overthrow of the
Ottoman Empire; given that they now ruled or had influence over certain created
states such as Jordan and Palestine. But it’s much clearer after that period of
time and particularly when the Americans come to (global) power, in the sense
that they are used to harass those political forces or organisations who are
against British interests in that area of the world. My knowledge of the Muslim
Brotherhood between the late 20s, when it was created, and the 50s is not
particularly large. It’s once the Americans come into the picture that it takes
on a different picture.
JC:
Sure. But for that picture which you excepted, would you say that they
generally, with respect to their relationship with British Intelligence, would
have been in resisting nationalist movements in the Middle East, where those
nationalist movements would be perhaps be threatening British control of
resources like oil, do you think that that’s essentially how they were used?
AM:
Yes, that is essentially right. That blueprint which was established then was
what the Americans then inherited after.
JC:
O.K. let’s turn to the Americans. Perhaps the most famous of these is Operation
Cyclone of 1979, with the CIA funding and training Afghan Mujahideen to fight
against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This goes through the 1980s for a full
decade. You mention this in the article, and you say that this was essentially
the project of President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski
who of course died not that long ago. That was a hugely significant operation
was it not in this narrative that we’re discussing. It seems like a huge
turning point at which we can see the trajectory leading to 9/11.
AM:
Yes, that’s true. I mean it’s important to get a little background, because as
I do mention in the article, the relationship between the American government
and the Muslim Brotherhood dates back to the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and
during that period in the 1950s and the 1960s, although a lot of the people who
actually were part of the CIA that was created from the Office of Strategic
Services during the Second World War were Arabists, American policy was against
secular nationalist Arab governments rising such as that of Gamal Abdel Nasser,
and so what the Muslim Brotherhood were used as were as saboteurs. This idea
that they are not violent is of course not true. They infiltrated –where they
could- Nasser’s security apparatus, the civil service, and they committed acts
of sabotage and effectively aided the West in undermining Nasser.
JC:
Was it not a Muslim Brotherhood person who attempted to assassinate him?
AM:
That’s right. But it’s important to link it to what we want to talk about in
Afghanistan and 9/11. It’s important to bring up the name of Sayyid Qutb, this
philosopher who effectively is the inspiration for al-Qaeda and certainly
influenced Osama bin Laden’s mentor Ayman al-Zawahiri.
JC: So
Qutb; this is the guy who…he was an Egyptian?
AM:
That’s right.
JC:
And he spent time in the US and was appalled by what he considered to be the
materialism of the West and that heavily influenced Osama bin Laden?
AM:
Absolutely. The utter decadence to him in terms of what he considered to be the
relationship between men and women in Western individualistic society. Nasser
did spare his life for a while, but he was executed by Nasser, so he turns out
to be a martyr of sorts. It may be a complicated feature, but it’s worth
drawing a distinction between the Muslim Brotherhood, that Egyptian-originated
organisation, (and) Wahhabism. And I think that this is a bit of the background
to the recent history of Egypt and the overthrow of the government that came
after the so-called Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood professes non-violence,
but that’s not true. They also are apparently believers in democracy. And
that’s a fundamental distinction between their brand of Islamic fundamentalism
and Wahhabism, this puritan authoritarian regime which may accommodate the idea
of having a king as the Saudis do, or having a caliph at the head of it. So
that is at least one minor distinction that we can make. When we go over to
Afghanistan, we’re not necessarily dealing with people who subscribe to the
Muslim Brotherhood philosophy exclusively. They were Islamic fundamentalists
influenced by all sides including Wahhabism.
JC:
O.K. so turning back to Afghanistan. There is some debate as to whether this
policy of Operation Cyclone was a means of fighting a proxy war against the
Soviets so as to draw them into their Vietnam, so to speak; to bleed them dry,
or whether this was essentially a way of fighting Afghan Communism, now that
Afghanistan was now communist, just as part of the so-called Cold War in
general, and then seeing an opportunity to bleed Russia dry. There seems to be
some ambiguity there as to what was intended with this Operation Cyclone.
What’s your view about it?
AM: I
think it was fundamentally about combating Soviet communism and its
manifestation in Afghanistan. But those who propound the view –led by the late
Brzezinski himself- do say that it was a pre-designed ploy to lure them in
there to meet these Mujahideen. I think it’s something that will continue to be
debated; I don’t think it can be definitively said. But as the policy developed
throughout the 1980s, the invasion occurred in 1979, and of course, there was
the transfer of the Carter administration to the Reagan administration and
there was no change in that. The fundamentals was that America urged Saudi
Arabia to provide funding; (they also urged) the Pakistanis under their
strongman leader Zia ul-Haq to also provide logistics, and the Americans would
also provide funding and train these jihadists known as the Mujahideen to fight
the Soviet invasion. And I think as time went on, it became clear that this was
something that could bleed the Soviet Union dry. The Americans could understand
“Ahh, this is looking like what we encountered in Vietnam, and these Afghan
warriors even going back to pre-Islamic times at the time of Alexander the
Great, nobody has ever managed to totally tame them or pacify them or conquer
them, we could be onto something”. The policy definitely germinated into one in
which the Soviet Union would be sufficiently weakened.
News
Reporter:(Sound of
helicopter buzzing) US National Security Advisor Brzezinski flew to
Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen
without revealing America’s role. On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass, he
urged the ‘Soldiers of God’ to re-double their efforts.
Zbigniew
Brzezinski: We know of their deep belief in God and we
are confident that their struggle will succeed. (Afghan voice speaking, presumably translating Brzezinski’s words to a
listening audience) That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one
day because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes and your
mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side. (Sound of hand clapping).
JC:
Yes, as I said to you before the interview, I think it’s a bit of a red herring
worrying too much about what the original intention was here, and what we’re to
make of what Brzezinski’s said in various interviews, reports of him having
said one thing in an interview and having denied it in other places. A bit of a
red herring because it ended up being this sending of Afghan Mujahideen as
proxies for what the West wanted to do. And they were being radicalised by the
West. I have information here from Nafeez Ahmed’s excellent book The War on Truth where, I’ll quote from
him: “Central to the US-sponsored operation was the attempt to manufacture an
extremist religious ideology by amalgamating the local Afghan feudal traditions
with Islamic rhetoric” and then, he’s quoting from a mainstream newspaper here:
“Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology ,
but Holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the
Islamic people of Afghanistan should assert their independence by overthrowing
the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow”. Nafeez continues, “Among the
myriad of policies designed to generate the desired level of extremism, the
U.S. funded to the tune of millions of dollars the production and distribution
in Afghanistan of school textbooks promoting the war values of murder and
fanaticism.” And this is quoting here from the Washington Post: “The primers which were filled with talk of jihad
and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines and have served
since then as the Afghan school systems core curriculum. Even the Taliban used
the American produced books.” Nafeez continues, “The Post cited anonymous U.S. officials admitting that the textbooks
steeped generations in violence.” So that’s quite damming. In fact, it’s very
damming, is it not? It is not just the use of proxies but the cultivation of
extremism itself for the purposes of this, so that your boys were not getting
killed, but someone else’s was, and you’re actually creating this monster
yourself.
AM:
Yes, that is an absolutely amazing extract. Again, it goes towards those
Western notions –what we discussed earlier on with regard to the Germans and
the British Empire about harnessing Islam wherever you can and the
fundamentalist tendencies to do battle, to be rigid and be capable of
accomplishing a particular goal with a fanatical mindset. On the one hand, yes,
it was predicated on a racial, disparaging form of Orientalism, but of course
there is a reality to that as well. As General Clark said himself in that CNN
interview that you mentioned earlier. What is also interesting is that Pakistan
was involved and Britain was involved. I’m sure that you’re aware of that quote
by Margaret Thatcher when she visited the Afghan border with Pakistan on a state
visit with General (Zia) ul-Haq where she..
JC: ...She
said “God is with you” or something like that.
AM:
Yes, “the hearts of the free-loving world are with you”; words to that effect.
And these are the forebears of the Taliban.
Margaret
Thatcher: …trying to destroy your religion, your way of life and
your independence. I want to say that the hearts of the free world are with you
and with those of your countrymen.
AM: So
absolutely harnessing that fundamentalist aspect of Islam has time and again
being crucial. Now you go back, and I’m sure that it will be mentioned in Mr.
Curtis’ book that Britain was involved, America was involved, but it’s not well
know that Israel was also involved. Israel also had a motivation for
undermining the Soviet Union because although it was the first country to offer
the created State of Israel de facto recognition, what transpired later on was
to set in motion this belief that the Soviet Union was an enemy of the State of
Israel and the Jewish people. And that has to do with the Stalinist purges, the
‘Doctors’ Plot’ and the attacks on Jews in the Soviet Union who it was felt had
a divided loyalty between the State of Israel and the Soviet Union. And then
also as time transpired, the Soviet Union was the backer of many Arab
liberation organisations including the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. And
so for that reason, while Ehud Barak was the head of Aman, Israeli (military)
intelligence during that time in the early 1980s, Israel offered support to the
most virulent, anti-Western militia. It was known as Hezb-e-Islami Mujahideen
and they were headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. They were supplied with weapons
Israel had acquired from the war in Lebanon, which was to purge Lebanon of the
Palestinian Liberation Organisation. And so Gulbuddin, as time went on after
the Afghan War had ended, fell out with his Saudi sponsors. But in due course,
those members of his organisation, a number of them, were transformed into the
Taliban. So that’s a useful quote that you mention there. Of course, the Afghan
people by heritage are warlike. But if you add this idea of Islamic
fundamentalism, and in particular Wahhabism to it, you have a really potent
brew and it’s no surprise that many people posit what transpired in Afghanistan
–this support militarily, educationally- this is what has now led to the global
Islamist movement represented by al-Qaeda and off-shoots like Jabhat al-Nusra
and the so-called Islamic State.
JC:
It’s an incredibly complex tapestry indeed. Now it’s often said of course that
the West has created Islamic extremism. That’s not really true from the
conversation we’re having here, but there’s no doubt that it has fanned the
flames of that tendency to an incredible extent. So there is some truth in that
statement is there not even though it has been exaggeration?
AM:
Yes, it’s harnessed it, is the best way to say it. It’s there and it’s dormant.
The West did not create it, but they have facilitated it.They’ve harnessed it.
JC:
Well, just before we finish, I want to look very briefly at the other wing of
this that you bring up. So this was your concern over the way in which known
terrorists are found to have been monitored by the intelligence agencies for
quite some period of time; months, years and it seems like a blind eye is
turned to them, especially if they go and fight for what the government think
is the right causes then they end up committing, or allegedly committing
terrorist acts in the West, or perhaps even serving as patsies; manipulated by
some kind of Gladio-like operation -maybe we’ll talk about that briefly as a
possibility. So this concern over what you might call intelligence failures,
are they always intelligence failures, or are we looking at sometimes the case
where a so-called intelligence failure is a success; it was supposed to fail,
and these individuals were supposed to carry out these attacks. What’s your
general impression of this whole murky area?
AM:
Well my view is that, yes, the intelligence world has those conventional
features that much of the public tend to understand. People who monitor things,
people who report on things, people who turn into spies. But there is a dark
art to intelligence. There is a murky side. One that is Machiavellian. Totally
immoral. You may actually come across situations where intelligence services
are creating false flags. There is a Turkish general who once admitted that
during the troubles in Cyprus, the Turkish military blew up mosques in order to
blame it on Christian Cypriots. So what I put into that write-up that I did was
the Salman Abedi story going back to what we discussed about Libya and the
overthrow of Gaddafi, Manchester, where Abedi came from is the home of a small
but distinguishable Libyan exile population. They were exiled while Gaddafi was
in power. And with the coming of the ‘War on Terror’, you had people who were
under Control Orders; that is a form of house arrest under the Prevention of
Terrorism Act, and these people were offered a deal: You can remain in the
position you’re in now or we will release you; we will grant you passports if
you fight Colonel Gaddafi. So that’s the first thing. They are going against
the rules of the game. With Abedi, we don’t have enough evidence about his
precise workings, but we do have that very important issue of Theresa May, the
Prime Minister being contradicted by the FBI in America, because after the
Manchester bomb went off, Theresa May claimed that Abedi had been a lone wolf,
but the FBI report said no. It actually informed you (Britain) that this man
was likely part of a North African cell, which was plotting the assassination
of a high-ranking British official. So as it turned out, not accurate
information, but information nonetheless. Yet, this man despite this warning
had gone under the radar. It does give a lot of cause for concern.
JC:
And brings up the question whether going under the radar is really going under
the radar in some cases.
AM:
Well, this is the thing, because we have examples in America with Tamerlane
Tsarnaev, the man who along with his brother was figured for being the Boston
Marathon bombers. We have Mohamed Merah, who was an Islamist, was suspected of
being the shooter in the killings in Toulouse and Montauban. With Tsarnaev, the
FBI denied that he was an agent of theirs, but an investigative journalist
named Michele McPhee –she’s just written a book entitled Maximum Harm- she believes, like a lot of people do believe
-because the FBI hasn’t released all the documents in its control- that
Tsarnaev was an FBI agent, and that he may have gone rogue because he was
denied American citizenship. In general terms, what one is conscious of is that
anytime there is a terrorist outrage in North America or Western Europe, the
question immediately is, “Should the laws be tightened up?” Therefore should
rights and freedoms be taken away from the citizenry? And the other point
obviously is military action: Should military action already in existence be
escalated, or should this terrorist outrage become the basis of a fresh
military intervention? I think at various points in time that it might be acting
towards an agenda as we’ve seen in Italy where Operation Gladio was in effect
and the investigations of Judge Filipe Casson and the revelations of the
neo-fascist Vinciguerra that people were set up by the government to commit
certain acts which would then influence the public mindset. Because what
happens after these terror attacks is fear, rage and those emotions can then be
used to form the basis of what we’ve just said: change in the law or effecting
some form of military intervention. And what happened after Manchester? Apart
from what has already transpired with these extraordinary powers for looking
over peoples Internet communications, we’re having thoughts about internment
such as occurred at the height of the Irish Troubles in the early 70s. We’re
hearing about new forms of censorship on the Internet. So that cannot be ruled out.
The evidence we have from history (provides a warning) –and it’s a very, very
serious matter that should be discussed more in the public domain and not be
dismissed.
JC:
And of course the official position on Operation Gladio is that well it doesn’t
exist anymore. Even if it did exist it doesn’t now. But then of course going
back to those days it wasn’t officially known about anyway, so you could say
that something’s going on today and that’s not known about either. I’ve no
reason to believe that that does not continue in some form, and of course we
had on this show before people are talking in terms of ‘Gladio B’. So really it
brings us to something we did touch on in the beginning which was what you hold
out as a possible solution to this. OK there needs to be this overhaul of
Western foreign policy, and you suggest the only way that this is going to
happen is if there are mass protests by people who actually understand what is
happening or at least have well-defined questions, so that when they hear
things on the news, there’re saying well, “is that really the truth?” And are
then thinking in these kinds of ways; asking these kinds of questions and
protesting in some form. And also bringing –this is the second arm of what you
suggest political pressure on the Establishment. So what do you have in mind
here? What kind of protest and what kind of pressure?
AM:
Well I think that the public are sufficiently informed today or have the means
to be informed to understand what we’ve discussed throughout this interview
about this overarching policy of the West utilising Islamic fanatics to do
their bidding in terms of achieving Western geopolitical objectives and that
these have had poor ramifications in terms of refugees and the commission of
acts of terror.
JC:
You say “have the means to be informed”, but by and large I find in the people
I speak to in ordinary life that they haven’t got this consciousness even
though many of the things we’ve referred to here today are in mainstream
publications. You would think the people would be aware, and yet I find
personally a lot of people are not aware.
AM: I
think there’s enough information there and certainly because of the nature of
the corporate press, you’ll very rarely find someone who joins the dots
together. So I guess what I’m saying, is that information is there, you know,
General Clark who we’ve referred to, issues to do with Operation Cyclone
–they’re there in the mainstream press, but very rarely is it put together.
It’s only put together by voices outside of the mainstream press. And that’s
tragic because I think that knowledge; that consciousness could create a public
movement that is not predicated on your ideological persuasion, which takes us
back to the beginning of our conversation, namely the way these issues; the
effects are used for ideological football in the United States, you know, the
Democrats versus the Republicans, whereas the public should be getting together
irrespective of that and pressuring their legislators through their
constituencies and also the creation of movements; mass movements as we used to
see in the past will call for this policy to stop. The only one that comes to
mind is Stop the War which is something considered to be a preserve of those on
the left. We want something that has more universal appeal. And when we talk
about Stop the War, it’s not just direct military action, which is obvious to
see, but these covert means by which the intelligence services give support. So
that is for the public. For the politicians, you would expect that they are
well-informed enough to understand these things. But again they do not take it
further in terms of the questions that are asked in Parliament. You know, when
Hillary Benn stands up there and criticizes, and then says we should then send
the Royal Air Force and its six planes to bomb northern Syria, people have to
think “Well, hang on, hasn’t Britain played a part in (this disaster)? Didn’t
the Guardian and other Western papers
report that British and French soldiers in the early part of the Syrian
conflict were at the borders with Jordan and countries like that offering
training to any rebels? That’s illegal to plot to overthrow a foreign
government and so we should be having Parliamentary inquiries into this, but
the politicians do not seem to be able to accomplish that, and I think that
that’s another interview as to why that is the case.
JC:
Well indeed, there seems to be an acceptable sphere of public discourse and the
kind of things that we’ve talked about today –even though they’re there in this
compartmentalised way in the mainstream media sources cannot be discussed as
you say in this joined-up way for fear of being considered a conspiracy
theorist, you know, somebody who is ‘supporting’ the terrorists –all these
accusations come out. I find it difficult to see how we can move beyond that.
And you have the other difficulty within –I’ve been talking to G. Edward
Griffin fairly recently about the truth movement and how that has achieved
certain things and in other respects has its problems. There’s all that
difficulty there in some cases muddying the waters. Before we had this
interview, I was mentioning to you the fact that when the Manchester bombing
happened, there were all these people coming out saying that it was a hoax. It
didn’t actually happen. It was all fake. And I was immediately hit by that
because I have relatives who live over the road from people who lost children
in that particular attack. So I know it wasn’t fake. And yet we have some of
these narratives being generated within what you might call the truth movement
in this very broad sense muddying the waters causing this kind of disruption so
that people can look upon that and say that anybody who is considering anything
outside of this acceptable sphere of discourse is a nutcase so therefore people
will not venture even into the reasonable things we’ve be talking about today
for fear of that accusation. How is it possible to move beyond that?
AM:
All I can say is that those within what may be termed ‘Alternative Media’; that
is, those who are not controlled by the demands of academic funding or
political party allegiance or the power of certain lobbies; they should really
just focus on the points that are indisputable and those that are of logical
imputation. That’s all I can suggest at the moment because it’s muddied on all
accounts: an insouciant public, what can you do about that? Ineffectual
politicians, what can you do about that? And we know about journalists –that
word “presstitute”, what an invention! That does really sum up the lack of
courage among those who are in the profession of journalism. And so those factors
should also be taken into account when we look at the truth movement for these
people probably through laziness, or some people allege that they are actually
agents who sow disinformation. It’s not helpful, so all we can do in our
writing is essentially to focus on the rational argument looking at solid
historical and contemporary back up to it. It’s important when we also discuss
these issues where the mainstream fear to tread, we also make a note that
things are compartmentalized –and literally so in the intelligence services.
These suspected false flags that may occur; it may not be the prime minister of
the day arranging it. I doubt if Obama had as much to do with the coup in
Ukraine as did Victoria Nuland and John McCain did. Do you see? What we talked
about the ‘double government’ and the continuation of this policy regardless
of...
JC:
I’ve heard people talk in terms of there being a ‘double CIA’, a ‘double MI6’,
but why not? That makes complete sense. I think at times, I have made the
mistake of giving the impression when I’m talking of the Deep State, I mean the
intelligence services, and I don’t really mean that. It’s easy to fall into
that trap. What I mean is that web of deep inter-connections –very influential
and powerful inter-connections- which will touch upon all sorts of structures
within society, so that there will be people within particular organisations
who are represented in that ‘deep state’ and there will be other people who
know nothing about it at all. It’s completely opaque to them. It’s a very
difficult thing to define. Is that the kind of thing you mean? That’s what I
mean when I talk about the ‘deep state’.
AM:
Yes, I think that the people who sponsor the politicians; corporations and the
like, have an influence on these questions (on) whether certain countries are
invaded and whether insurrections are started. It really only stands to reason
that this is the case. And remember who sponsors these think-tanks, (including)
those ones that are respectable: the Brookings Institute and the RAND
Corporation, albeit that it is a right-wing body, but it is a prominent and
influential body with affiliations with the US military going back a long
period of time. But within security services, there is no question that you do
even have competing factions within them. Unlike in Western Europe when after
the Second World War, the West did appropriate figures from the Fascist and
Nazi ancien regimes, and installed them to be heads of the security services,
Britain had a more diffuse one. Because you had people from the left (and) you
had people from the right. We know that from those defectors. And the story of
Peter Wright, whose information may not have been reliable in some ways, but I
think there was an element in MI5 –not the whole of MI5- who were working
towards the destabilisation of Harold Wilson’s government, and that that
segment within MI5 joined forces with bits of military intelligence;
specifically the one that was operating out of Northern Ireland and developed
Operation Clockwork Orange, which was this disinformation campaign against
certain prominent British political figures. I mean this is all fact. And so
that compartmentalization does occur. As I was telling you before the
interview, I did get a message through one of my websites from somebody who has
a managerial post in NATO; a former US Army officer, and in regard to my
article on the Manchester bombing on whether it was criminal negligence or
something more sinister, he informed me that a member of his staff had reached more
or less the same conclusions that I had in my article, but that they had not
put it in their final report. He was just interested in what I had to say. So
it’s a very murky area.
JC:
That is quite an amazing thing to happen. Very revealing. So we’re nearing the
end of our conversation, so if there’s anything you’d like to stress for people
listening today, what would that be?
AM:
There’s ‘blowback’ to re-emphasize to the public at large; look at the blowback
that has occurred and that should reinforce this idea that your rights and
freedoms are always under threat and military intervention is always on the
line. It’s time to stop. Let’s have some sort of a public conscious mass effort
through groups that have been created for the express purpose of putting
pressure to stop this decades –centuries-long policy that is utterly cynical in
its nature and execution…
JC:
Well let me come back to you about this business about blowback. You recall what
I mentioned about what Tom Secker said about it that it is only a partial
explanation. So if you use it as perhaps the main way of getting people to
oppose war as a means of understanding why terrorism is happening at home. Is
there not a danger of feeding into the problem that we’re trying to overcome;
this circumscribed sphere of discourse. It’s OK to talk about blowback (but)
it’s not OK to talk about the possibility that some faction in you security
services might be aiding and abetting this. If you just concentrate on
blowback, you’re creating the conditions under which this is perpetuated.
AM: We
don’t just focus on blowback. Yes, we need to keep on disseminating the whole
picture but (refer to) blowback as a reminder that these compartmentalized
discussions that are had over immigration, refugees; should the law be
tightened up in regard to the Internet –(that) these are not taken in isolation
as one act of terrorism, but the wider picture should always be borne in mind.
Also just to add to what we’re discussing about the issue of oversight by
politicians. Again, I think that there is that element of compartmentalization,
because after Gladio, there were some legislative commissions set up in a
number of Western European countries, but it was very, very limited and
eventually swept under the carpet. And the same thing in the United States.
Just one of those suspect bombings –acts of terror in the name of Islam- was
subject to congressional oversight. That was the one to do with the Boston
Marathon bombing and Tamerlane Tsarnaev. There was a congressional inquiry and
it did find that the FBI missed many chances –not just one- several chances to
actually catch him. But that was just compartmentalized. It doesn’t link into
the wider picture, for instance in regard to that report by Human Rights Watch
in coordination with Columbia University Law School and its human rights
institute, which said that all but four of the Islamic terrorist incidents to
have occurred in the United States since 9/11 –for a ten year period- were to
do with FBI sting operations. That would actually encompass issues of not just
blowback, but the whole strategy of how informants are being handled. And if we
had that kind of scrutiny in a more coherent, dedicated fashion, then I think
we might have less of this problem. If it’s a problem of negligence or if it’s
a problem of (inaudible) there might be some method or reason for taking people
off the radar.
JC:
Which is why conversations like this are extremely important. And there needs
to be more of them, no matter how challenging they are to engage with or even
to prepare for, because there is so much information her, it is important that
these conversations are had because they create this narrative, they create
this broad picture which does inform a different way of looking at the events
that are happening in the world and it is so important that people do have that
broad picture otherwise it remains compartmentalized in our minds. All these
little things are joined together and they can therefore be put into categories
that are conducive to a normal understanding of what’s going on when in fact it
may be an abnormal reality that we’re facing here. And as you say,
conversations based on the evidence that is there, not just conjecture, these
kinds of evidence-based conversations, I think, are vital and I thank you very
much indeed Adeyinka for coming back to have such a conversation. I am amazed
at your erudition and the way you can recall this information on the spot so
well, it’s a delight and a privilege to speak to you and I thank you very much
for coming back on the programme. And I very much hope that people enjoyed this
and will have learnt from it. Also that they will follow some of the links that
I will put, well many links I will put in the show notes to back up; to
evidence a lot of the things that have been said here today. Thank you very
much Adeyinka for coming on again.
The
first part of a wide-ranging interview with Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed
about my essay, “The Pan-Islamic Option: The West’s Part in the Creation and
Sustaining of Islamist Terror”. This segment focused in recent policies
followed by the West through which weaponised Islam is used as a tool in
seeking geo-political advantage. But this has come with huge moral, financial
and security costs.
Julian
Charles: Hello everybody! Julian Charles here of The Mind Renewed dot Com coming to you as usual from
the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK, and today I’m
delighted to welcome back to the programme the lawyer and university lecturer
Adeyinka Makinde, who joined us last year to discuss his academic article, “Can
the British State Convict Itself?” Adeyinka trained for the law as a barrister
and lectures in criminal law and public law at a university in London, and has
research interests in intelligence and security matters. He is regularly
published online writing on international relations, politics and military
history, and has served as a program consultant and provided expert commentary
for BBC World Service Radio, China Radio International and the Voice of Russia.
Adeyinka, thank you very much for coming back on the programme.
Adeyinka
Makinde: Thank you; it’s a pleasure Julian.
JC:
Well,
it’s great to have you on for a second time; I’m glad that I didn’t put you off
the first time. Well, this time we’re going to be talking about the subject of
one of your recent articles on your blog, and indeed published at
globalresearch.ca. I’ll just mention your blog while we’re in passing
–Adeyinkamakinde.blogspot.co.uk – and the article which caught my eye you
called “The Pan-Islamic Option : The West’s Part in the Creation and
Development of Islamist Terrorism”,which
is obviously a very disturbing subject, but one that I’m sure the majority of people
listening to this program will have some familiarity with given the coverage of
themes like this in the Alt Media in general, and, indeed, our previous
conversations with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and, of course, James Corbett, who
talked to us about the rise of ISIS a couple of years back, and perhaps I
should also mention, because I was very pleased with this particular
conversation, Dr. Daniele Ganser on Operation Gladio. So I do recommend people do
go and check that out, because I’m quite sure that Gladio will come up in this
conversation. What struck me about your article, Adeyinka, is that it is
extremely helpful in pointing out with many, many examples just how long this
problem – the West’s cultivation of Islamist terror for various geopolitical
purposes– has been going on. So, before we get onto the detail of this, perhaps
you could tell us what your motivation was for penning an article like this?
AM: Well,
the immediate motivation was discovering a meme, which had been circulating on
social media, declaring Obama, the “Muslim President”, as being responsible for
ISIS and that Hilary Clinton is the “godmother” of ISIS, and I thought I doubt
very much that Mr. Obama is a Muslim, but I can see it’s part of this
ideological and cultural warfare in America where people seek to blame each
party for the ills associated with the American Republic in contemporary times, but how narrow it is. People should
know better given the access to media they have to show that this was more of a
long-standing issue, an over-arching issue, which transcends the politician who
holds power of the day. It may also be a deep state issue, and also it was
really an accumulation of writings I had been doing for some time.
JC: Yes,
as you say there is this polarization of opinion in the media and in the public
as to whether the Right is to blame for what’s going on in the world today or
the Left is to blame, and as you mention in the article a lot of debate about
the nature of Islam itself, and you write in the article: “While each aspect of
these debates are important in their own right, the compartmentalized nature of
the discourse arguably serves as a useful device which distracts the public
from grasping the broader picture.”And
I’m putting together your mention a moment ago of this phrase “the deep state”
with the word that you use:”device”. Do you see this compartmentalization that
we see in public discourse on these matters as a deliberate device by the deep
state to divert people’s attention away from the real nature of these problems?
AM:
Oh,
I think it does serve that purpose and it’s possibly, very possibly an intended
device. Certainly, whether migrants of Islamic persuasion from the Middle East are
assimilable into Western Society is a genuine issue, maybe a sensitive one, but
a genuine one nevertheless. We can, as we are mature people, separate the
discourse of the rank racist from those who are interested in the whole economics
of the matter about absorbing large amounts of immigrants or of cultural defence
even, but the sad fact is that that aspect of the discourse succeeds in
obfuscating the root cause of this wave of migrants on two levels, whether
you’re talking about economic migrants, who are not affected by wars in the
Middle East, or those who are affected by the wars in the Middle East, and the
obfuscation is that the West has been involved in a prolonged policy of using Islamist
militias to overthrow governments in the Middle East. So the West is
responsible for wrecking whole nations and enabling the displacement of whole
groups of people, and the idea is that if you in America and the United Kingdom
and the rest of Western Europe can just focus on that problem that has been
prevailing for some time, you will sort out these issues related to economic
migration and other displaced persons seeking refuge in the EU. Stop bombing
these lands, stop overthrowing governments and overturning societies. Therein
we shall find some measure of a solution.
JC: So
the two things you want people to be aware of is this long history of Western
support for militant Islamic groups, and also to question very seriously when
we hear of terrorists having been monitored by intelligence agencies, and you
helpfully delve back into history in the West to find many examples that give
us a broader picture of all this, and we’ll come to some of that history in a
bit, but first let’s pause to consider some of the indications in more recent
times of Western support for Islamist terror groups, or at least support by
allies of the West, we’ll talk about to what extent each one of those applies:
direct Western support and/or support by allies of the West. Let’s talk around
that for a moment. You mention quite well known facts, but I think it’s important
never to forget these facts, so they’re very much worth repeating. Remarks by
former US Vice-President Joe Biden speaking at Harvard in 2014 and the words of
General Wesley Clark interviewed on CNN in 2015. Now in a moment I’m going to
be asking you for your reaction to those comments, but let’s just refresh
people’s memories about those remarks by playing back a couple of clips, and in
fact I’m going to be including quite a few clips during the course of this
interview because I think it’s a good idea to have the words fresh in our minds
while they’re being discussed, so the first clip here is of Joe Biden speaking
at Harvard on October 2nd, 2014, and the second clip is of General Wesley
Clark, who is a 4-Star US General and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of
NATO from 1997 to 2000, and he’s being interviewed on CNN in February 2015.
Joe
Biden: What my constant cry was that our biggest problem was
our allies. Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria. The
Turks are our great friends, and I have a great relationship with Erdogan who
I’ve just spent a lot of time with, the Saudis, the Emiratis et cetera. What
were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially
have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, what did they do? They poured hundreds of millions
of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against
Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda
and the extremist elements of Jihadis coming from other parts of the world. Now,
if you think I’m exaggerating, take a look. Where did all of this go? So now
what’s happening all of a sudden everybody is awakened because this outfit
called ISIL, which was al-Qaeda in Iraq, which when they were essentially
thrown out of Iraq, found open space and territory in eastern Syria, worked
with al-Nusra, who we declared a terrorist group early on, and we could not
convince our colleagues to stop supplying them.
Wesley
Clark: Look, it just got started through funding from our
friends and allies because, as people will tell you in the region, if you want
somebody who’ll fight to the death against Hezbollah you don’t put out a
recruiting post or say sign up for us, we’re going to make a better world, you
go after zealots and you go after these religious fundamentalists – that’s who
fights Hezbollah – it’s like a Frankenstein.
JC: OK,
so having listened to those again, what do you say they reveal? What do they
tell us?
AM: Well,
I think they tell us that there is an underlying policy, which is consistent regardless
of who is in power. We’ll go back into the history in a moment, but in the
recent history, say in the Cold War era, a policy that’s been consistent from
the time of Bill Clinton, definitely from the George Bush era, and although
Barak Obama was pledging to make a break with the past, he essentially
continued those policies intact. Now, we really see those policies still
continuing under Donald Trump. That does suggest there is an agenda that
appears to be played out regardless of ideology, regardless of politics, and it
does also have serious investigative journalistic confirmation. It also has
serious academic research backing. There was a paper just a few years ago,
which was turned into a small book called National
Security and Double Government by an academic from Tufts University (named)
Michael J. Glennon, and he was borrowing the phrase ‘Double Government’ from
the famous British Constitutionalist from the 19th century Walter
Bagehot, who spoke about effectively a parallel government, a government of
self-interested civil servants and power interests, who control an agenda
regardless of who is in power, and so what Michael J. Glennon did was to
compare the policies of the Bush administration- Bush Jr. – and the Obama administration, and what did he find? No
change. And I think that segues into this issue of the West’s support and
connivance with its allies over the use of Islamist proxies to overthrow
Governments who do not meet Western approval.
JC: Do
you think that’s something that happens pretty much everywhere? I mean, you
know, when you talk about ‘Double Government’ or ‘Parallel Government’ of
course I immediately think of things like the ‘Continuity of Government’
provisions in the US that people often talk about in relation to 9/11, and of
course Operation Gladio itself here in Europe, which on this program that Daniele
Ganser described as a kind of shadow NATO or hidden, parallel NATO. Do you
think these kinds of power structures are to be found pretty much everywhere?
AM:
I
think it’s fair enough to say that there are always power brokers in every
society. I think in every government set up that word ‘Deep State’ – it’s
derived from a Turkish term – this fusion of military officials and gangsters
dictated the way the government ran, much in the way that Propaganda Due, the pseudo-Masonic
Lodge, operated in Italy. You go to literally any society. For instance in
Nigeria, where I originate from, you had something called the ‘Kaduna Mafia’,
which is the northern Muslim elite, who through successive military governments
and the first civilian government played a huge part in the decision-making
process in Nigeria, so I think in most societies you are likely to find this
sort of set-up and arrangement.
JC: So,
going back to those remarks we heard a few moments ago: they’re out there,
they’re in the open, we have access to documents that talk about this kind of
thing, which we’ll talk more about in a few minutes I’m sure, and we have other
things like the Clinton emails, some of which again point in this kind of
direction. Now this material is out there and yet very little seems to change,
which makes me want to ask – I guess it’s more a statement of frustration than
a question really – what’s been done to stop any of this?
AM: Well,
from what I can tell very little. If you recall from the issue of Gladio when
it was exposed by the then Prime Minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, there
were only a few parliamentary enquiries in Europe, and then they were only
limited – that’s to do with Gladio – so very little there, and in regard to
what General Clark has said, despite the overwhelming evidence, press reports
and position papers, the same can be said for Western Europe – the United
States and Britain – there’s been
absolutely no enquiry, but that evidence is there. Wesley Clark after all was the
man who revealed that there was this plan, just days after 9/11 when he was
revisiting the Pentagon, to take out seven countries in five years and that was
going according to the neo-conservative agenda, the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC).
JC: Yes,
absolutely indeed. I found that really quite eye-opening when I first heard
that, and I still do even though I’ve heard it many times; I still find it
very, very striking, and we’ve referred to that several times over the years here
at TMR. But, let’s hear it once again, because I think it’s really important to
continue refreshing our memories about these kinds of things. So this is Wesley
Clark in conversation with Amy Goodman on Democracy
Now! speaking on March 2nd, 2007.
Wesley
Clark: About ten days after 9/11 I went through the Pentagon
and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, and I went
downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used
to work for me, and one of the generals called me in and he said: “Sir, you’ve
gotta come in and talk to me a second.” And I said: “Well, you’re too busy.” He
said: “No, no”, he says, “We’ve made the decision to go to war with Iraq”. This
was on or about 20th September. I said: “We’re going to war with
Iraq, why?” He said: “I don’t know.” (general
laughter from the audience). He said: “I guess they don’t know what else to
do.” (more laughter) So, I said:
“Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said: “No,
no”, he says: “there’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go
to war with Iraq.”He said: “I guess
it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good
military and we can take down governments”, and he said “I guess if the only
tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.” So, I came
back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in
Afghanistan, and I said: “Are we still going to war with Iraq?”, and he said:
“Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece
of paper and he said: “I just got this down from upstairs from the Secretary of
Defense’s office today, and this is a memo that describes how we’re going to
take out seven countries in five years starting with Iraq and then Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran. I said: “Is it
classified?” He said: “Yes, Sir!” I said (yet
more laughter from the audience) “Well, don’t show it to me.” I saw him a
year or so ago and I said: “Do you remember that?” He said: “Sir, I didn’t show
you that memo; I didn’t show it to you!”
AM:
And
we see those position papers actually predicting, and we see their fulfillment
to this very day in terms of the countries that have been taken out: Iraq,
Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, an ongoing quest in which it looks as if they’ve
being frustrated, but in all situations all roads lead to Iran. We talk about
position papers, apart from the Project for a New American Century, and these
two revelations by General Clark, you also have a paper from 2008 by the Rand
Corporation, which is a well-known Right-wing think-tank long in existence. They
produced a paper which was sponsored by the Pentagon, which was about the unfolding
of the ‘Long War’, the role of the US Army and this ‘Long War’ that had to be
waged in the Middle East, which had to do with preserving American power, and it’s
very, very specific that one way in which the United States can maintain its
power is to give support to these conservative monarchies in the Gulf – Saudi
Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, for instance, and the other pliable nations
presumably like Egypt and Jordan. You give support to them, but also make use
of Salafists, Islamic radicals, and play upon the sectarian divide of Sunni and
Shia. It actually says “fomenting”. I’m not quoting it word for word, but fomenting
these problems in these zones where you can pit the Salafists against the
Shias, that will keep them busy and will likely prevent terrorist outrages in
the West as occurred on September 11th, and so all the signs are
there. There are many others we could make a use of. Those who formulated the
Project for a New American Century papers were also responsible for the
document known as the Securing the Realm
document that was presented to Binyamin Netanyahu in his first tenure as the Israeli
Prime Minister in the mid-1990s, and it called for the rolling back of Syria
and co-operation with “moderate” Arab and Muslim states like Jordan, which is
effectively a protectorate of Israel, and Turkey, to challenge these
recalcitrant regimes who are anti-West and anti-Israel. So, it’s out there, but,
alas, there’s no sort of concerted conscientious move among the political
classes, the society, to actually examine the realities of this policy, this
overarching policy, and challenge it.
JC: And
something of this Western support for Salafists did come out, did it not, into
the mainstream media with the US Defense Intelligence Agency document 2012 that
was obtained by Judicial Watch in 2015, and of course Mike Flynn had been in
charge of the DIA during that time, 2012 to 2014, and he was challenged on this
document in an interview? But, this document does say that the Gulf States,
Turkey and the West desired to have a Salafist State develop in the Middle East,
essentially for the purposes of going against Assad, for going against Syria.
And let me quote it here. So, Section 8c headed: The Effects on Iraq, reads: “If the situation unravels, there is
the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist Principality
in Eastern Syria, Al Hasaka and Der Zor, and this is exactly what the
supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian Regime,
which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion, Iraq and Iran,
and then to define what is meant by the ‘supporting powers’ we go to Section
7b, and there they are defined as: “On the other hand ‘Opposition Forces’ are
trying to control the eastern areas – Al Hasaka and Der Zor – adjacent to the
western Iraqi provinces of Mosul and Anbar, in addition to neighbouring Turkish
borders. Western countries, the Gulf States, and Turkey are supporting these
efforts.” So there we have a definition of what the “supporting powers” means,
so there it is. It seems, though, that Mike Flynn, as head of the DIA at the
time, did flag this up to the Obama Administration, but they pretty much
ignored it. In fact, he was asked in that interview if he thought that they
turned a blind eye to his analysis and he replied: “I don’t know whether they
turned a blind eye. I think it was a decision, a willful decision.” So, let’s
hear that. It’s quite a long excerpt, but I think it’s worth persevering with,
because I think it’s very instructive. This is Mike Flynn interviewed on Al Jazeera in 2015 by Mehdi Hasan.
Mehdi
Hasan: Many people would argue that the US actually saw the
rise of ISIL coming and turned a blind eye, or even encouraged it as a
counterpoint to Assad, and a secret analysis by the agency, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, in August 2012, said and I quote: “There is the
possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist -though it’s not
secret anymore; it was released under FOI- Principality in eastern Syria and
this is exactly what the Supporting Powers to the Opposition want in order to
isolate the Syrian Regime.” The US saw the ISIL Caliphate coming and did
nothing.
Mike
Flynn: Yeah, I think that where we missed the point, where we
totally blew it, I think, was in the very beginning. I mean we’re talking four years
now into this effort in Syria. Most people won’t even remember it’s only been a
couple of years of the Free Syrian Army – that movement – and where are they
today? Al Nusra? Where are they today and how much have they changed? When you
don’t get in and help somebody, they’re going to find other means to achieve
their goals. And I think right now, what we have allowed is these extremist
militants to come in.
Mehdi
Hasan: Why did you allow them to do that General? You were in post;
you were the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Mike
Flynn: Yeah, right, right, those are policy issues.
Mehdi
Hasan: This is a memo I quoted from . . . did you see this
document in 2012? Did this come across your table?
Mike
Flynn: Yeah, yeah, I paid very close attention to all . . .
Mehdi
Hasan: So, when you saw this, did you not pick up the phone
and say: “What on earth are we doing supporting the Syrian rebels?”
Mike
Flynn: Sure, that kind of information is presented and...
Mehdi
Hasan: And what did you do about it?
Mike
Flynn: …those become argued about it.
Mehdi
Hasan: Did you say: “We shouldn’t be supporting these groups?”
Mike
Flynn: I did. I mean we argued about the different groups that
were there, and we said, you know, who is it that’s involved here, and I will
tell you that I do believe that the intelligence was very clear, and now it’s a
matter of whether or not policy is going to be as clear and as defining and as
precise as it needs to be, and I don’t believe it was.
Mehdi
Hasan: Just a moment, you’re saying, just to clarify here,
you’re saying today, today my understanding is, we should have backed the
rebels. You’re saying in government you agreed with this…
Mike
Flynn: We should have done more earlier on in this effort, you
know, than we did. We…
Mehdi
Hasan: But in 2012, three years ago, let’s just be clear for
the sake of our viewers, in 2012 your agency was saying, quote: “The Salafists,
the Muslim Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda in Iraq are the major forces driving the
insurgency in Syria.” In 2012, the US was helping co-ordinate arms transfers to
those same groups. Why did you not stop that if you’re worried about the rise
of quote/unquote ‘Islamism’.
Mike
Flynn: I hate to say it’s not my job, but my job was to ensure
that the accuracy of our intelligence that was being presented was as good as
it could be, and I will tell you that it goes before 2012 when we were in Iraq
and we still had decisions to be made before there was a decision to pull out
of Iraq in 2011. I mean it was very clear what we were going to face.
Mehdi
Hasan: Well, I admire your frankness, General. Let me just say
before we move on, just to clarify once more, you are basically saying that
even in government at the time, you knew those groups were around, you saw this
analysis and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?
Mike
Flynn: I think the Administration.
Mehdi
Hasan: Did the Administration turn a blind eye to your
analysis.
Mike
Flynn: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it
was a decision, I think it was a willful decision.
Mehdi
Hasan: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had
Salafist, al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood amongst it?
Mike
Flynn: A willful decision to do what they’re doing.
JC:
He’s
right there; it seems very clear that the Obama Administration was basically
saying leave that alone, just leave that alone, that is policy.
AM: Absolutely,
it’s all out there, and I think also that that particular document you
mentioned, the DIA document that was discovered through the Freedom of
Information Act request by Judicial Watch, also refers to the methodologies
that would be used, so we can look to the past and we can actually look to the
present. In other words, this whole idea about creating ‘safe zones’. Any time
you hear that word ‘No Fly Zone’, we should be aware that that is a code for
protecting Salafist insurgents and enabling their growth to overthrow a
government, because that very technique, which was referred to in that paper,
was used under the Right-to-Protect doctrine, so it was called when Gaddafi was
overthrown when that uprising occurred in Benghazi, so the whole idea was that
if the Libyan Air Force gets within range they will be bombed out of existence.
And then we see it again being threatened while the Russians are there in
Syria, it’s broached ‘No Fly Zone’, Aleppo ‘No Fly Zone’, using human
suffering, genuine human suffering, as a fait accompli, but actually, really,
it’s part of a devious plan to give these Salafists, Jihadists, the opportunity
to wreak havoc and to overthrow governments not to the liking of the West.
Let’s also be aware that there are interests that coalesce here, but ultimately
it’s the West that is the deciding influence in things, so the Saudis, the
Turks will not act without Western approval much in the same way as the Israeli
Government, which has an interest in the destruction of Syria and the
balkanization of the Arab world, also tends to rely … For instance, they don’t
want to attack Iran independently, they want America to help them do that, so
that coalescence of interests, which, for the Saudis, is about extending their
realm of influence. That fight they had over the years with secular Pan-Arabism,
which they effectively won after the Six Day War and the demise of Gamal Abdel
Nasser and now the overthrow of Libya as Gaddafi and the Baathists ruler-ship
in Iraq, they want to extend their influence, and also there was the issue of
the oil pipeline going through Syria. There’s also that interest I mentioned
about Israel being fundamentally predicated on the balkanization of the Arab
world. Even before its creation, a necessary condition was the break-up of the
Ottoman Empire, and then after the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement,
wherein the British and the French divided the Middle East into these
artificial nation states, Israel has sought to have these nations further
divided, and then of course you have Turkey; the Turks are interested in the
oil pipeline because obviously they want to be the conduit between the Gulf and
Western Europe.
JC: So
this is the pipeline going from Qatar up through Syria into Turkey, rather than
the alternative, which is going from Iran through Syria servicing Europe
through that way?
AM: Absolutely.
That’s right. So the Turks wanted to be involved with that, but Assad refused,
and also it links into something I believe we’re going to discuss later on in
terms of the connection between Turkey and its Ottoman predecessor with Germany,
and that is to do with Turkish ambitions to establish some form of a pan-Turkic
sphere of influence through central Asia right up to the border with China.
JC: Yes,
indeed we will come to that. We will talk about Germany and the fact that it
has had these kinds of relationships in the past. You mention Gaddafi and his
overthrow in 2011, and that brings up the role of France and even Britain in
this action. Do you want to say something about that?
AM:
Absolutely.
I think right from the beginning my understanding was that the action to
overthrow Gaddafi was initiated by French intelligence, and I think that has
been actually to a certain degree confirmed. Nicolas Sarkozy was involved in
that, but also once that decision was made, and Britain became involved with
America acting as a guarantor and its naval power in the Mediterranean
supported operations; once that was agreed upon and things fell into place and
the overarching issues of overthrowing certain governments then came into play,
so the French were involved there, particularly with the use of their air
force, but also the British were involved there in a way which is fairly
clear-cut compared to some of these other insurgencies we will talk about,
because we know for a fact that Britain sent Special Forces to train members of
the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group, and they were
embedded within them, they trained them, and directed operations in the battle
against the Libyan forces of Colonel Gaddafi.
JC: And
we have this confirmed by one of the Clinton emails.
AM: We
not only have that, we have the BBC confirm it. And, if you recall, at the
beginning of the conflict, near its beginning in the early part of 2011, there
was this episode where a certain Libyan insurrectionist, a militia, caught
British officials who were being accompanied by Special Forces. These were, I
think, people from the Foreign Office, but obviously MI6, being accompanied by
a detachment of SAS troops, and so I think that was a shaky introduction. But, I
think things were sorted out because obviously they were released and the
subsequent relationship we’ve just mentioned about British forces, Special
Forces, helping them did come about.
JC: Yes,
going back to France’s role in this, the accusation that’s often made against
Sarkozy seems to be borne out by one of the Clinton emails that France was very
worried, or I suppose the elite of France was very worried, that Libya was
going to establish a pan-African currency based on Libyan gold, and that they
had billions, apparently, in gold and a similar amount in silver, and there
were various other reasons why France was concerned that Libya would be going
its ‘own way’. Again, let me quote from that email. So this is email No.
C05785522, which you can read at FOIA.state.gov -and I shall put links into the
show notes of course. So this is Sidney Blumenthal to Hilary Clinton dated
April 2nd 2011, and the subject is: “France’s Client and Gaddafi’s Gold.”
O.K., and I’m quoting here: “According to sensitive information available to
these individuals” -and I’ve just explained that sources with access to one of
Gaddafi’s sons- and I’m continuing with the quote now: “According to sensitive
information available to these individuals, Gaddafi’s government holds 143 tons
of gold and a similar amount in silver. This gold was accumulated prior to the
current rebellion, and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African
currency based on the Libyan gold dinar. This plan was designed to provide the
francophone African countries with an alternative to the French franc CFA”, and
there’s a source comment here: “According to the knowledgeable individuals,
this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than 7 billion dollars.
French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current
rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President
Nicholas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya. According
to these individuals, Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues:
A. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil
production,
B. Increase French influence in North Africa,
C. Improve his internal political situation in France,
D. Provide the French military with an opportunity to
reassert its position in the world,
E. Address the concern of his advisors over Gaddafi’s
long-term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in francophone Africa.
So, it does seem that there’s very good evidence here
that it was in France’s interest to push all of this.
AM: Oh,
absolutely. It was under Nicolas Sarkozy’s watch that France became integrated
into NATO’s military structure. General Charles De Gaulle had withdrawn France
from NATO’s military structure back in the 1960s. In fact he’d evicted NATO
from its Paris Headquarters, and was later forced to relocate to Brussels, and Nicolas
Sarkozy’s intention was, as you stated, to reinforce France’s power, and we saw
that in the way France intervened in the Ivory Coast, and also in Central West
Africa around Mali. But what you mentioned there about the creation of the gold
dinar by Col. Gaddafi is very, very important, because again that was something
that was broached, but there wasn’t some sort of official confirmation. At
times you really feel that definitely was the case, but we need the evidence,
and, you know, due to WikiLeaks and things like that, and admissions by the
likes of Roland Dumas and Wesley Clark, we do get confirmation and if we look
at that economic angle to the overthrow of Gaddafi, we can see precedents
elsewhere: Syria is an example of a country that wasn’t a member of certain
western banking institutions. And also Saddam Hussein: One of the reasons he
was overthrown is because he threatened not to use the dollar in terms of
trading in oil; he wanted to use the euro, and so it does seem that those
nations from the so-called developing world, or other parts of the world
actually, any part of the world, who do not toe the line with Washington are
earmarked for destruction.
JC: I
want to return to Iran. You mentioned Iran a little while ago, and I want to
throw into the conversation yet another one of these pieces of documentary
evidence, because I think it’s a very striking piece of information, so this is
the Brookings Institution publishing their “Which
Path to Persia”document from 2009,
their so-called analysis paper, which is subtitled “Options for a New American
Strategy towards Iran”,an
interesting title there that seems to connect with the Project for a New
American Century in my mind, and they have various suggestions as to how regime
change could take place in Iran, and they actually go so far as to suggest
inspiring an insurgency – this is in chapter 7 – and using groups like Mojahedin-e-Khaiq,
which, at the time, were designated as terrorists by the US, and here is the
Brookings Institution, which is very well-known think-tank and one of the most
widely quoted think-tanks in Washington DC, actually suggesting yes, we could
use these people to conduct terrorist operations against Iran. What’s your
reaction to the fact that we have a document like that, and yet this
information is not widely known by people?
AM:
It’s
not widely known presumably because there
can be that fallback position that,“Oh well,
this is just merely a think-tank, they’re putting things out into the open and
it’s up to the policy makers and the deciders of Government to rely on it or
not”.
JC: And
yet, at the time, they were designated as terrorists. You would think that that
would be unacceptable, or you would think should be unacceptable even to be
mentioned by such a supposedly august institution.
AM: That’s
absolutely true. Again, being an august institution obviously it will not be
well known to the general public, but, time and again, we see these issues in
these documents. Let me put it this way: think about Senator John McCain, the
Chairman of the Arms Services Committee in the Senate, who made visits while
that Libyan insurrection was ongoing in the early part of 2011, just a month or
two after it began. It may not have been widely known to the public at the
time, although Col. Gaddafi in one of his speeches, which was reported in the
West, but discounted as the ravings of a mad man, he said, “you’re supporting al-Qaeda”.
Here’s John McCain walking through the streets of Benghazi and basically giving
succor to Islamist belligerents, people who subscribe to the ideology of al-Qaeda,
the very people who were said to have perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity, the people
who were supposed to be the enemies of the West. You can look at the same thing
with John McCain’s illegal visits to Syria, and meeting so-called ‘moderates’,
who, later on, turn out to be members of hardline Islamist groups, and you also
see John McCain fraternizing with people with neo-Nazi sympathies like the
leader of Svoboda in Ukraine. So, putting the Brookings Institute and these
think-tanks to one side, we do actually see confirmation between that sort of
contact between a prominent serving western politician and these proscribed
organizations, so not surprising.
JC:
No,
not surprising really, and under the surface we can imagine all sorts of links
making a quite coherent policy towards all this in fact, and linking back into
history, and of course this is where your article I think is so important is
where you show this way of thinking is nothing new; it’s been going on for a
long time, and in many different places, and one of the first places that you
go to in your discussion here is Germany, and you start by looking at Heinrich
Himmler giving a 1944 speech where he is basically saying that Islam is ideal:
If you’re going to be a soldier, well why not be an Islamist? And you also go
back beyond that to Kaiser Wilhelm’s views of Muslims as good for guerilla
warfare, so do you want to tell us about Germany’s cultivation of Islam,
Islamism, for the purposes of war?
----------------------------------
And I’m afraid the rest of that interview with Adeyinka
Makinde will have to wait till next week, because my time for editing this week
has simply come to an end. I wish it were not so, but it is, so the next part,
as I say, looking into some of the history of this phenomenon will be next
week, not a fortnight from now, but as I always have to say: “All being well.”
