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Terrorist : Osama Bin Laden, is he?
 

Who is Osama Bin Laden?

                                                                                                                                                                     Last Update:   05/19/2006

But first, we need a general introductory essay to understand, from a historical and psychological context of Bin Laden. In my view, the article that describes him with the best journalist ethic and objectivism is the one of Weaver. The New Yorker : by Mary Anne Weaver

Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden was born in 1955, the youngest of some twenty surviving sons of one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest and most prominent families. He is part puritanical Wahhabi, the dominant school of Islam in Saudi Arabia, yet at one time he may have led a very liberated social life. He is part feudal Saudi, an aristocrat who, from time to time, would retreat with his father to the desert and live in a tent. And he is of a Saudi generation that came of age during the rise of OPEC, with the extraordinary wealth that accompanied it: a generation whose religious fervor or political zeal, complemented by government airline tickets, led thousands to fight a war in a distant Muslim land. That Pan-Islamic effort, whose fighters were funded, armed, and trained by the C.I.A., eventually brought some twenty-five thousand Islamic militants, from more than fifty countries, to combat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States, intentionally or not, had launched Pan-Islam's first jihad, or holy war, in eight centuries.

Bin Laden's father was a Yemeni who had immigrated to the kingdom and had made a fortune by building a construction company into a financial empire. Osama's mother, a Syrian beauty, was his father's fourth, and final, official wife (the other three were Saudis), and she was considered by the conservative bin Laden family to be far ahead of her time. (For instance, she refused to wear a burka over her Chanel suits when she travelled abroad.) Osama was her only son. Tutors and nannies, bearers and butlers formed a large part of his life. He and his half brothers—and, to a lesser extent, his thirty half sisters—were playmates of the children of the kingdom's most prominent families, including various royal princes and princesses. Nonetheless, his childhood has been described as an often lonely one. "It must have been very difficult for him," one family friend told me. "In a country that is obsessed with parentage, with who your great-grandfather was, Osama was almost a double outsider. His paternal roots are in Yemen, and, within the family, his mother was a double outsider as well—she was neither Saudi nor Yemeni but Syrian."

In 1968, Osama's father (along with his American pilot) died in a helicopter crash, and Osama, at the age of thirteen, inherited eighty million dollars. When he was fifteen, he had his own stable of horses, and at nineteen he entered King Abdul-Aziz University, in Jidda, where he received a civil-engineering degree in 1979. A barber who saw him often in the early nineteen-seventies has told the Mideast Mirror that in Beirut's flashy night clubs and bars his client was known as a free-spending, fun-loving young man—"a heavy drinker who often ended up embroiled in shouting matches and fistfights with other young men over an attractive night-club dancer or barmaid."

There is no evidence that bin Laden showed any interest in politics before 1979, when three events shook the Middle East: Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution toppled the Shah. Years later, looking back on the invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden told an interviewer from the Arabic-language Al-Quds al-Arabi, "I was enraged, and went there at once."

Friends of the bin Laden family told me that the truth wasn't quite so dramatic. Osama spent the first years of the war travelling throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf and raising millions of dollars for the jihad. Some of the funding came directly from the Saudi government, some from official mosques, and some from the kingdom's financial and business élite—including his late father's construction empire, the Bin Laden Group, which by then had interests on three continents.

In 1984, bin Laden moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani border town near the Khyber Pass which served as the key staging area for the jihad in Afghanistan. That year, I and other journalists in the region began to hear of a man known as the Good Samaritan or the Saudi Prince. He would arrive unannounced, it was said, at hospitals where wounded Afghan and Arab fighters had been brought. He was lean and elegant, and dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez of the Afghan tribes—a blousy knee-length tunic top—over tailored trousers of fine English cloth, and he always wore English custom-made Beal Brothers boots. According to the stories that we heard, he was soft-spoken, and went from bed to bed dispensing cashews and English chocolates to the wounded and carefully noting each man's name and address. Weeks later, the man's family would receive a generous check.

Soon we began to hear other tales. In the ungovernable tribal areas on the Pakistani-Afghan frontier, and in the military training camps outside Peshawar and in Afghanistan, jihad trainees and clerics began to speak of another enigmatic Saudi. He had arrived in an unmarked military transport plane, and brought in bulldozers and other pieces of heavy equipment, which he deployed to design and construct defensive tunnels and storage depots, and to cut roads through the deep valleys of Afghanistan. According to one frequently told story, the man often drove one of the bulldozers himself across the precipitous mountain peaks, exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. This man also turned out to be bin Laden, and the equipment that he brought in was furnished by the Bin Laden Group.

Four years had passed since the C.I.A. began providing weapons and funds—eventually totalling more than three billion dollars—to the various Afghan resistance groups, all of which were, to varying degrees, fundamentalist in religion, autocratic in politics, and venomously anti-American. During (and also after) the jihad in Afghanistan, bin Laden met frequently with Hassan al-Turabi, an erudite Islamist who now effectively controls the rigid Islamic government in Sudan. He dined regularly with President Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's military ruler, who was a conduit for the C.I.A. arms. He cultivated generals from the Pakistani intelligence service. And he befriended not only some of the most anti-Western of the Afghan resistance leaders fighting the jihad but also the Egyptian cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison for conspiracy to "wage a war of urban terrorism" against the United States.

The C.I.A. station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989 was Milt Bearden, an avuncular, barrel-chested man with an easy smile. He arrived with the first shipments of Stinger missiles that Washington dispatched to the combatants, and he spent a good deal of time in the mountains with the resistance groups. Not long ago, I asked Bearden, who is now retired, if he had known bin Laden during the war years.

"No," he replied. "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did, but did I say that this tall, slim, ascetic Saudi was instrumental? No, I did not. There were a lot of bin Ladens who came to do jihad, and they unburdened us a lot. These guys were bringing in up to twenty to twenty-five million dollars a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra two hundred to three hundred million dollars a year. And this is what bin Laden did. He spent most of the war as a fund-raiser, in Peshawar. He was not a valiant warrior on the battlefield."

According to Bearden, bin Laden and the Saudi contingent "fought in only one important battle that I know of: the battle of Ali Khel"—in Paktia province, not far from the area struck by United States cruise missiles in August of 1998. "The Soviets ran out of steam just before we ran out of supplies. There were perhaps twenty or twenty-five Saudi shaheeds"—martyrs. Bin Laden, fighting under the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah, appeared to have modelled himself on the twelfth-century military hero Salah al-Din, who effectively checked the Crusaders and reconquered Jerusalem.

"As time went on," Bearden told me, "the story of the battle of Ali Khel grew, as did that of the Saudis' battlefield role. Part of the myth of bin Laden and of the Saudi fighters sprang from this. The U.S. government, along with others, sang the ballad of the Saudi shaheeds, and, dollar for dollar, King Fahd matched our funds. We put five hundred million dollars into Afghanistan in 1987 alone, and the Saudis matched us bill for bill."

In 1989, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in defeat, bin Laden returned to Jidda, and to his place in the family's business empire. But with the collapse of the oil boom Saudi Arabia faced growing economic and social problems. According to the State Department's annual human-rights reports, the kingdom's royal family was also becoming increasingly repressive and corrupt. Bin Laden began to criticize the feudal Saudi regime openly, and to support its opposition groups. His half brothers and some of his royal friends—including Prince Turki, the chief of Saudi intelligence, and Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, with whom bin Laden had worked during the jihad—attempted to restrain him, and for a time he devoted himself to personal matters: expanding his holdings (which are based, in large part, on more than sixty companies, many of them in the West) and producing heirs. He now has four wives, carefully chosen for their political connections or their pedigree, and some ten children.

Bin Laden's quietude, however, did not last long, as he increasingly came under the sway of two of Saudi Arabia's most militant clerics, Sheikhs Safar Hawali and Salman Awdah—whose views are considered revolutionary by the Saudi regime, and whose fatwas, or religious opinions, bin Laden still propagates. In 1991, the royal family expelled him from the kingdom for his political activities, and his family publicly renounced him. He sought refuge in Sudan.

After that, bin Laden's political evolution accelerated. His departure from his homeland coincided with the arrival there of tens of thousands of United States troops for the Persian Gulf War. When the Saudi regime permitted them not only to occupy its soil but to remain after the victory, bin Laden's antipathy to both the regime and the United States was inflamed. In his mind, the United States had become to Saudi Arabia what the Soviet Union had been to Afghanistan: an infidel occupation force propping up a corrupt, repressive, and un-Islamic government.

During five years of exile in Sudan, from 1991 to 1996, bin Laden placed his wealth—a fortune now estimated at more than two hundred and fifty million dollars, largely in foreign bank accounts—at the disposal of militant Islamist groups around the world. Whether he retains access to his family's fortune, which is estimated to be worth some five billion dollars, is a matter of dispute.

While bin Laden was based in Sudan, the Saudi regime warned him more than once that it would countenance no actions directed against the Saudi throne. He ignored the warnings. In the early nineties—during the Bush Administration, and presumably with the knowledge of the United States—the Saudis secretly dispatched hit teams to Khartoum with a contract on bin Laden's life. And in 1994, as a result of urging by the United States, the normally cautious House of Saud took what one Saudi expert told me was an astonishing step: it antagonized its fundamentalist community by publicly stripping bin Laden of his citizenship, citing his "irresponsible behavior and his refusal to obey instructions issued to him." The kingdom also stripped him of much of his Saudi property and many of his assets.

Then, inexplicably, in November of 1996, the Saudi royal family invited bin Laden to return home. Or so he claimed, in an interview with Al-Quds al-Arabi, and he added that the regime had also offered to restore his assets and the properties it had seized. In exchange, bin Laden was expected to swear an oath of allegiance to King Fahd. He refused. Saudi officials will neither confirm nor deny that the offer was made; indeed, over the years they have consistently refused to comment on anything about bin Laden—a testament, perhaps, to their continuing bewilderment about how to cope with him.

According to a declassified State Department report, when bin Laden was in Sudan he established and financed three terrorist training camps in the north of the country; bought two farms in the east; and paid to transport some five hundred "Afghan Arabs," as the foreign jihad fighters are called, to Sudan from Pakistan after Pakistani officials threatened to expel them. He mixed war and profit, establishing new companies and entering joint ventures with the Sudanese government. More and more Afghan Arabs came to Sudan to support his operations there. Some were instructors in his military training camps; others, management experts and economists, ran his businesses. Still others served as liaisons among a dozen or so bin Laden-supported militant Islamist groups.

Yet David Long, a former official in the State Department who is considered an expert both on the Saudis and on terrorism, said, "Is Osama bin Laden the exclusive font of terrorist evil? No. This is an informal brotherhood we are seeing now, whose members can draw on each other; it's not a clear, sterling network. Bin Laden's organization"—an umbrella group called al-Qaeda, or "the base"—"is not a terrorist organization in the traditional sense. It's more a clearing house from which other groups elicit funds, training, and logistical support. It's a chameleon, an amoeba, which constantly changes shape according to the whims of its leadership, and that leadership is Osama bin Laden. It's highly personalized." Long went on, "Bin Laden is a facilitator—a practitioner of the most ancient way of doing things in the Middle East. He does not have the brilliant, top-of-the-art international structure of Abu Nidal"—the Palestinian terrorist of the nineteen-seventies and mid-eighties. "If you were to kill Osama tomorrow, the Osama organization would disappear, but all the networks would still be there." Long believes that the more serious threat bin Laden poses to the interests of the United States lies in his ability to destabilize friendly Arab governments, such as Saudi Arabia's, whose support is geopolitically crucial to us. (In fact, bin Laden very likely sees his battle with the House of Saud as his most important struggle; from his perspective, the United States is of secondary concern.)

Other United States officials agree, and warn that bin Laden has given financial backing to anti-government groups in Egypt (where he has underwritten some of the activities of the Gama'a al-Islamiya and al-Jihad), Algeria, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines. He has supported Islamic fighters not only in Afghanistan but also in Chechnya, Kosovo, Kashmir, Bosnia, and Tajikistan. But even though these groups may enjoy his patronage, he does not control them, and they are everything that his own organization is not: they are well structured, and most have long histories and specific (and often legitimate) complaints and concerns.

In May of 1996, under pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, the Sudanese government asked bin Laden to leave, and he returned to Afghanistan permanently, accompanied by two military-transport planes carrying some of his wealth, more than a hundred of his Afghan Arab fighters, and his four wives. Between two and three thousand of his other loyalists fanned out into Europe and across East Africa. "It was like sending Lenin back to Russia," an American diplomat said to me. "At least in the Sudan we could indirectly monitor some of his activities."

The American war against bin Laden has affected United States policy throughout much of the Islamic world, particularly in South Asia and the Middle East. Memorably, on August 20, 1998, the Pakistani Army's chief of staff, General Jehangir Karamat, was playing host in Islamabad to his American counterpart, General Joseph Ralston, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Around ten o'clock in the evening, as the two men were having dinner, Ralston looked up from his chicken tikka, checked his watch, and informed his host that in ten minutes some sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles would be entering Pakistan's airspace. Their destination, he said, was Afghanistan, where bin Laden was believed to be operating four training camps. General Karamat was stunned, and appalled.

"It was a 'This is happening as we speak' kind of conversation," an American intelligence official told me. "Ralston was there, on the ground, to make absolutely certain that when the missiles flew across Pakistan's radar screen they would not be misconstrued as coming from India and, as a consequence, be shot down." The intelligence official paused for a moment, and then said, "This is one hell of a way to treat our friends."

By the following day, General Karamat's anger—and that of the government he served—had turned to rage. A number of the Tomahawks either had been poorly targeted or had not fallen where they were aimed. Two of the four training camps that were hit and destroyed, in the Zhawar Kili area of Afghanistan's Paktia province, were facilities of Pakistan's own intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I. According to a highly placed official, five I.S.I. officers and some twenty trainees were killed. The government of Pakistan was not only furious but embarrassed, because it had not been taken into Washington's confidence. Why had there been only ten minutes' notice? And why had General Karamat been notified, instead of the Prime Minister?

Pakistan wasn't our only affronted ally. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority—indeed, much of the Islamic world—expressed dismay. The United States had reason to be embarrassed as well. For, despite President Clinton's claim, in a televised address a few hours after the missile strikes, that a "gathering of key terrorist leaders" had been expected to take place at one of the target sites, bin Laden and his top lieutenants were more than a hundred miles away when the missiles struck. The meeting that Clinton referred to had occurred a month earlier, in Jalalabad.

The United States had expended seventy-nine million dollars on satellite-guided cruise missiles to destroy just thousands of dollars' worth of obstacle courses, field barracks, and tents. Only one of the six facilities struck was a bin Laden training camp. "It was all rather Biblical," a former intelligence official told me at the time. "The President was very specific: he wanted two targets, for the two embassies that were bombed." (The second target was the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant, in Sudan, which the Administration claimed was used by bin Laden in either the manufacture or the distribution of chemical weapons. The Administration retreated from this theory last May, when, in refusing to answer a lawsuit, it released the frozen assets of the plant's owner.) Of the missile attacks, the former intelligence official asked, "Was it an intelligence failure or a policy failure? Or both?"

In the following year, there were approximately seventy temporary closings of American embassies and consulates after the C.I.A. warned that bin Laden appeared to be in the "advanced stages" of operational plans for another strike against an American facility abroad. But the agency conceded that it lacked precise information on where he might strike, or when. In a sense, bin Laden did not need to act; for, even without another bombing, he was holding the United States government hostage.

Before Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was deposed, in a military coup last October, one of his key officials said to me, "I think what the Americans are really trying to say to us is 'Why don't you do our dirty work—get bin Laden and deliver him or, preferably, eliminate him?' We've told the Americans, 'Provide the Taliban with evidence, and let them try bin Laden there.' "

The Taliban has offered to do just that, once it receives evidence from the United States, but Washington does not take the offer seriously. ("Disingenuous, even laughable" is the way one United States official described it to me.) More recently, as the Taliban scrambled to avert sweeping financial and commercial sanctions imposed by the United Nations at the insistence of Washington, the Taliban's leaders floated a proposal that a panel of Islamic judges be convened in Afghanistan to determine bin Laden's fate—presumably to decide whether to extradite him to a third country for trial or to exonerate him. United States officials were divided on whether the Taliban was attempting to find a face-saving way to expel bin Laden or was merely playing for time; the Clinton Administration rejected the proposal peremptorily. The United States was equally perplexed by a letter allegedly written by bin Laden to Mullah Omar—and leaked by the Taliban's official press on October 29th—in which bin Laden offered to leave Afghanistan in exchange for a guarantee that his new location would be known to only two Taliban officials, including his son-in-law.

As I thought about what the other options might be, I remembered something else that the Pakistani official had said to me: "Quite honestly, what would Pakistan gain by going into Afghanistan and snatching bin Laden for you? We are the most heavily sanctioned United States ally. We helped you capture Ramzi Yousef"—the convicted mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in New York. "We helped you capture Mir Amal Kansi"—he has been sentenced to death for the murder of two C.I.A. employees outside the agency's headquarters in 1993—"and all we got were thank-you notes. You lobbed missiles across our territory with no advance warning! You humiliated our government! You killed Pakistani intelligence officers! And then you come to us and say, 'It's your problem. You've got to get Osama bin Laden for us.' "

Saudi Arabia, for its part, continues to permit American troops to billet in the country, but it has prohibited them from conducting air strikes against Iraq. And, despite the American presence—or, perhaps, because of it—the kingdom's princes and foundations and wealthy businessmen, who include a number of bin Laden's friends, remain the leading benefactors of many of the world's militant Islamist groups. Thus, in a barely disguised attempt not to further antagonize bin Laden and his followers, the royal family has not allowed the F.B.I. to interrogate any of the suspects allegedly involved in the 1995 and 1996 bombings of United States military installations in Riyadh and Dhahran, and in both cases it abruptly cut short any inquiry into the broader dimensions of the bombings. More recently, the House of Saud has refused to permit United States investigators to interrogate one of bin Laden's key financial aides—Sidi Tayyib, a man of some influence, whom Saudi intelligence officials either have arrested (at the strong urging of Washington) or have lured into changing sides. But the Saudis, following their own investigation, bluntly told their C.I.A. counterparts that there was no basis for treating Tayyib "like a criminal." Tayyib, who is married to one of bin Laden's nieces, probably knows as much as anyone else about bin Laden's intricate financial empire.

As bin Laden's international image and stature increase—along with his support, both ideological and financial, among some of the kingdom's élite and the élites of other states in the Persian Gulf—any Saudi hopes of quietly resolving its bin Laden problem by force become less tenable. And each time the Clinton Administration raises the stakes, and further enhances bin Laden's prominence, more and more disaffected Saudis flock to join the kingdom's militant Islamist underground, of which bin Laden remains a central part. That is one of the most worrisome consequences of America's obsession with one man.

For twenty years, Osama bin Laden has refashioned himself with extraordinary dexterity and skill. Now the House of Saud, ever fearful of the Islamist challenge to its throne, appears intent on a transformation of its own—to turn what has been an often complex battle of wills between the Saudi royal family and its errant son into a far simpler conflict, one that pits bin Laden and his followers against the United States.

Qui est Ben Laden?

ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 19.09.01

• MIS A JOUR LE 18.09.01.  Oussama Ben Laden, par Robert Fisk Reporter spécialiste du monde arabe au quotidien de Londres "The Independent", Robert Fisk raconte pour "Le Monde" ses dernières rencontres avec Oussama Ben Laden. Il brosse le portrait d'un homme réfléchi et modeste, obsédé, à l'époque, par l'idée de la destruction des régimes proaméricains et qui rêvait de transformer l'Amérique en "l'ombre d'elle-même".

Il a changé. La première fois que j'ai rencontré Oussama Ben Laden, son apparence était d'une humilité presque ostentatoire : robe saoudienne et turban blancs sans ornement, barbe modeste. Dans le désert du Soudan, il se servait du matériel de construction de sa société pour tracer une nouvelle route reliant un village éloigné de l'axe Khartoum-Port Saïd. Les villageois faisaient rôtir de la viande et dansaient, petite fête pour remercier le héros de la guerre russo-afghane. Ben Laden finançait la route et, manifestement, il aimait le rôle du guerrier devenu bienfaiteur aidant les pauvres mais refusant les énormes plateaux de nourriture qu'on lui offrait. Il posait respectueusement la main sur sa poitrine quand les anciens du village tentaient de chanter ses louanges.

Un an plus tard, en 1996, par une nuit humide et chaude, je le revis en Afghanistan. D'énormes insectes volaient dans l'obscurité et se cramponnaient comme des teignes sur la robe blanche de Ben Laden et sur les vêtements de ses partisans armés. Ils se posaient sur mon carnet de reporter et, quand je les écrasais, leur sang souillait les pages. Ben Laden était toujours d'une politesse scrupuleuse ; chaque fois que nous nous rencontrions, il me présentait l'assiette de nourriture qu'on offre à un étranger : un plateau de fer-blanc garni de fromage, d'olives, de pain et de confiture. Encore un an plus tard, je passai une nuit dans l'un de ses camps de guérilla, très haut dans les montagnes afghanes ; il faisait tellement froid que, en me réveillant, j'avais du givre dans les cheveux. Il plongea sous le couvert de ma tente et s'assit en tailleur en face de moi, tout en se curant les dents avec un bout de bois de miswak. Il écoutait en silence chacune de mes questions et réfléchissait parfois un moment avant de répondre. Beaucoup d'Arabes, de peur de paraître stupides devant un journaliste, ont l'habitude de dire la première chose qui leur vient à l'esprit, pas Ben Laden. Cette nuit-là, je dormis sous une couverture grossière et laissai mes chaussures à l'extérieur de la tente.

Chaque fois que nous nous rencontrions, il interrompait nos entretiens pour dire ses prières ; ses partisans armés – venant d'Algérie, d'Egypte, des Etats du Golfe, de Syrie – étaient agenouillés à côté de lui, suspendus au moindre mot qu'il m'adressait, comme s'il était le messie. Il n'a toutefois jamais prétendu être un mahdi ou un prophète. J'ai donc été très surpris par la dernière bande vidéo provenant d'Afghanistan. Elle a dû être tournée il y a à peine un mois et montre un Ben Laden que je ne connaissais pas. Sa barbe était plus longue et plus hirsute, et il semblait regarder de haut ses partisans – Ben Laden est grand. Il portait une robe dorée et brodée, et même un turban doré sur la tête. Qu'est-ce que cela signifiait ? Pourquoi l'or et les broderies ? S'était-il mis à croire en lui en plus de Dieu ?

Dans la montagne, le 20 mars 1997, il donnait encore une image d'humilité. A l'époque, il n'avait que quarante et un ans, mais des poils blancs commençaient à apparaître dans sa barbe grossièrement taillée et il avait des poches sous les yeux. J'ai perçu une petite infirmité, une raideur dans une jambe qui le faisait boiter légèrement. J'ai conservé mes notes, gribouillées dans l'obscurité glaciale à la lumière d'une lampe à huile qui crachotait entre nous. "Je n'ai rien contre le peuple américain, a-t-il dit, seulement contre son gouvernement."

Combien de fois ai-je entendu ces mots au Moyen-Orient – même en Iran ? Des décennies de dictature ont persuadé beaucoup de musulmans de la région que les gouvernements ne représentent pas leur peuple. J'ai tenté d'expliquer à Ben Laden que ce n'était pas pareil en Occident, que le peuple américain – contre qui il était censé ne rien avoir – considérait son gouvernement comme composé de représentants élus. Il ne répondit rien sur ce point, sinon : "Nous sommes encore au début de notre action militaire contre les forces américaines."

En regardant l'épouvantable catastrophe de la semaine dernière, les deux avions de ligne éventrant la fine enveloppe des tours du World Trade Center, je me suis souvenu de ces paroles. Une autre remarque, plus inquiétante, qu'il m'avait faite dans les montagnes glaciales m'est également revenue à l'esprit. "Nous croyons que Dieu s'est servi de notre guerre sainte en Afghanistan pour détruire l'armée russe et l'Union soviétique, a-t-il dit. Nous l'avons fait du sommet de la montagne sur laquelle vous êtes assis – et maintenant nous demandons à Dieu de se servir de nous une fois de plus pour faire la même chose à l'Amérique, pour en faire l'ombre d'elle-même. Nous croyons aussi que notre combat contre l'Amérique est beaucoup plus simple que la guerre contre l'Union soviétique parce que certains de nos moudjahidins qui ont combattu ici en Afghanistan ont aussi participé à des opérations contre les Américains en Somalie – et ils ont été étonnés par l'effondrement du moral américain. Cela nous a convaincus que l'Amérique est un tigre de papier." Ce n'est pas le "tigre de papier" qui m'a impressionné. C'est l'idée de faire de l'Amérique "l'ombre d'elle-même" qui m'a fait froid dans le dos. Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire, me suis-je demandé à l'époque ? Et, bien sûr, si Ben Laden, se révèle finalement le responsable du crime contre l'humanité de la semaine dernière à New York et à Washington, ces mots prennent un sens plus fort. Durant quelques minutes, la puissance américaine est devenue une ombre.

Ben Laden m'a toujours semblé rechercher une célébrité qu'il n'a jamais trouvée – jusqu'à ce que les Américains et Time le qualifient de "parrain du terrorisme international", et jusqu'à ce que les Etats-Unis offrent une récompense de 5 millions de dollars pour sa tête (somme d'une faiblesse insultante pour un millionnaire comme lui, a-t-il peut-être pensé). Lors de notre dernière rencontre dans la nuit glaciale en Afghanistan, Ben Laden s'est emparé des journaux en arabe qui étaient dans mon sac et s'est précipité dans un coin de la tente pour les lire pendant vingt minutes, sans tenir compte ni de ses combattants ni de son hôte occidental. Bien que saoudien – il avait déjà été déchu de sa nationalité –, il ne savait même pas que le ministre des affaires étrangères iranien venait de faire une visite officielle à Riyad. Il n'écoute donc pas la radio, me suis-je demandé ? Est-ce bien là le "parrain du terrorisme international" ?

Ben Laden m'avait parlé longtemps auparavant de la décision immédiate qu'il avait prise en apprenant que l'armée soviétique avait envahi l'Afghanistan. Il avait apporté le matériel de construction de sa société à des chefs tribaux en révolte pour combattre ce qu'il considérait comme une armée corruptrice et hérétique pillant l'Afghanistan islamiste. Il finança le voyage de milliers d'Arabes moudjahidins en Afghanistan pour qu'ils se battent à ses côtés. Ils vinrent d'Egypte, du Golfe, de Syrie, de Jordanie, du Maghreb. Beaucoup furent taillés en pièces par des mines ou déchiquetés par les mitrailleuses des hélicoptères Hind soviétiques qui attaquaient les guérilleros d'Afghanistan. Sur le plateau montagneux où j'ai passé la nuit, il y avait derrière ma tente un gros abri antiaérien de 7,5 mètres de haut sur 7,5 mètres de large, taillé dans le roc de la paroi, et qui s'étendait peut-être sur 30 mètres dans l'obscurité. Le matériel de construction de Ben Laden avait servi à creuser ce trou géant dans le rocher. Aujourd'hui, ses hommes sont partis dans les nombreux camps d'entraînement construits à l'origine par la CIA – ce qui explique, naturellement, pourquoi les Américains savent où lancer leurs missiles Cruise. Les camps ont été créés par les Américains.

Lors de notre première rencontre, au Soudan en 1994, j'ai convaincu Ben Laden – contre son gré – de me parler de cette époque. Il m'a raconté que, pendant une attaque contre une base offensive russe proche de Jalalabad, dans la province de Nangahar, un obus de mortier était tombé à ses pieds. Dans les fractions de seconde de rationalité qui en ont suivi la chute, il a éprouvé – c'est ce qu'il m'a dit – un grand calme, une impression d'acceptation sereine qu'il a attribuée à Dieu. L'obus (à la grande consternation des Américains aujourd'hui) n'a pas explosé. Quelques années plus tard, à Moscou, j'ai rencontré un ancien officier de renseignements soviétique qui avait passé quelques mois en Afghanistan pour tenter d'organiser la liquidation de Ben Laden – tout comme les Américains tentent de le faire aujourd'hui. D'après lui, il avait échoué parce que les hommes de Ben Laden ne se laissaient pas acheter. Personne ne voulait le trahir. "C'était un homme dangereux, le plus dangereux pour nous", me dit ce Russe. Ben Laden m'a répété qu'il n'avait jamais accepté la moindre balle provenant de l'Occident, qu'il n'avait jamais rencontré d'agent américain ou britannique.

Cependant, ses bulldozers et ses engins creusaient des routes dans les montagnes pour que ses moudjahidins lancent leurs missiles antiaériens Blowpipe, fabriqués en Grande-Bretagne, assez haut pour atteindre les Mig soviétiques. L'un de ses partisans armés m'a emmené plus tard sur la "piste Ben Laden", odyssée terrifiante de deux heures dans la pluie et le verglas au bord de ravins effrayants, tandis que le pare-brise s'embuait à mesure que nous montions dans la montagne glaciale. "Quand on a foi dans le djihad (la guerre sainte), c'est facile", m'a expliqué le terroriste en se battant avec le volant quand des pierres jaillissaient de sous les roues et s'enfonçaient dans les nuages pour tomber dans les vallées. "Toyota est bon pour le djihad", a-t-il dit en riant. C'est la seule plaisanterie que j'aie entendue de la bouche d'un des hommes de Ben Laden.

De temps en temps – c'était en 1997 –, des lumières clignotaient à notre adresse loin dans l'obscurité. "Nos frères nous font savoir qu'ils nous ont vus", dit le terroriste. Il nous a fallu encore deux heures pour atteindre le camp de Ben Laden ; la Toyota dérapait en arrière vers les falaises escarpées, les phares illuminaient des cascades gelées au-dessus de nous.

La réponse de Ben Laden à Washington prétendant qu'il était le plus grand "terroriste" mondial – et je lui ai affirmé que les Américains le pensaient vraiment – était toujours la même. A cette époque, on l'accusait principalement d'attaques contre les forces américaines dans le Golfe. "Si libérer mon pays est considéré comme du “terrorisme”, a-t-il répondu, c'est un grand honneur pour moi." Il a dit qu'il n'y avait pas de différence entre les gouvernements américain et israélien, entre les armées américaine et israélienne. Il avait toutefois de l'estime pour l'Europe – et la France en particulier – parce qu'elle prenait ses distances vis-à-vis des Américains. Il n'a pas fait de commentaires sur la politique française en Afrique du Nord, pas plus qu'il n'a mentionné l'Algérie, même si j'ai eu l'impression que le mot planait au-dessus de nous comme un fantôme pendant quelques minutes. Parmi les combattants assis à côté de moi se trouvaient des Algériens. En 1996, Ben Laden m'a averti : toutes les forces occidentales dans le Golfe, y compris les troupes françaises et britanniques, étaient en danger. En 1997, il a fait comprendre que ses menaces n'étaient plus dirigées contre Paris et Londres.

En effet, à l'époque, il semblait plus obsédé par l'idée de la destruction des régimes arabes pro-américains du Moyen-Orient que par une attaque contre l'Amérique. Il était encouragé par le soutien politique qu'il recevait de la communauté pakistanaise de plus en plus encline au djihad. Cette nuit-là, sous la tente, il m'a donné une affiche en ourdou qui proclamait le soutien des étudiants pakistanais à sa "guerre sainte" contre les Américains ; il m'a même tendu des photographies en couleur de graffitis sur les murs de Karachi exigeant le retrait des troupes américaines des "deux lieux saints" (La Mecque et Médine, en Arabie saoudite). Ben Laden m'a affirmé avoir reçu quelques mois plus tôt un émissaire de la famille royale saoudienne qui lui a dit que sa nationalité saoudienne lui serait rendue, ainsi qu'un nouveau passeport saoudien et 2 milliards de riyals saoudiens (3,390 milliards de francs) pour sa famille, s'il renonçait au djihad ; celui-ci était retourné en Arabie saoudite. Lui et sa famille avaient rejeté l'offre, m'a-t-il dit. A l'époque, Ben Laden avait trois femmes ; la plus âgée était la mère de son fils de seize ans, Omar, enfant très intelligent, la plus jeune était encore une adolescente. Un autre de ses fils, Saad, m'a été présenté. Ils étaient manifestement excités – de façon innocente – par le fait d'être entourés de tant d'hommes armés. Tous vivaient avec lui – ainsi que les femmes et les enfants d'autres moudjahidins – et habitaient un complexe à l'extérieur de Jalalabad. Ben Laden m'a même invité à visiter ces maisons étouffantes, humides et misérables en compagnie de l'un de ses combattants égyptiens. Ses épouses – la plus jeune devait retourner dans sa famille – n'étaient pas là. Chacune avait sa propre tente. "Ce sont des femmes qui ont l'habitude de vivre dans le confort", a dit l'Egyptien. Le campement était protégé par des draps de toile et quelques fils barbelés. On avait creusé dans la terre une rigole d'écoulement et trois latrines séparées ; dans l'une d'elles flottait une grenouille morte. Le fils de l'Egyptien, assis à côté de nous avec un fusil sur les genoux, a dit que des agents de renseignements du gouvernement égyptien avaient vu le camp.

Un autre Arabe du camp s'est montré plus expansif. Il a dit qu'aucun autre pays n'était ouvert à Ben Laden. Il ne pouvait pas partir d'Afghanistan. "Quand il était au Soudan, les Saoudiens voulaient le capturer avec l'aide des Yéménites, a dit le jeune homme. Nous savons que le gouvernement français a essayé de convaincre les Soudanais de le leur livrer parce que les Soudanais leur avaient déjà livré le Sud-Américain Carlos. Les Américains pressaient les Français de s'emparer de Ben Laden au Soudan. Un groupe arabe payé par les Saoudiens a essayé de le tuer, mais les gardes de Ben Laden ont répliqué en faisant feu, et deux hommes ont été blessés."

Ben Laden est un homme grand et mince ; ses yeux sombres me regardaient fixement pendant qu'il me parlait de sa haine pour la corruption saoudienne. En fait, lors de ma longue conversation avec Ben Laden en 1996 – la nuit des moustiques –, le royaume saoudien occupait plus son temps que les Etats-Unis. Pour lui, la trahison du peuple saoudien avait commencé vingt-quatre ans avant sa naissance, quand Abdulaziz al-Saud avait proclamé son royaume en 1932. "Le régime a démarré sous la bannière de l'application de la loi islamique, et, sous cette bannière, tout le peuple d'Arabie saoudite est venu aider la famille saoudienne à prendre le pouvoir, a-t-il dit. Mais Abdulaziz n'a pas appliqué la loi islamique ; le pays a été créé pour sa famille. Puis, après la découverte du pétrole, le régime saoudien a trouvé un nouvel appui – l'argent – pour enrichir le peuple, lui offrir les services et la vie qu'il voulait et le contenter."

Pour Ben Laden, la date la plus importante était 1990, année de l'invasion du Koweït par Saddam Hussein. "Quand les troupes américaines ont pénétré dans le pays des deux lieux saints, les oulémas (autorités religieuses) et les étudiants de la charia ont protesté vigoureusement dans tout le pays contre l'intervention des soldats américains, m'a dit Ben Laden. Le régime saoudien, en commettant la grave erreur d'inviter les troupes américaines, a révélé sa duperie. Il a apporté son soutien à des nations qui combattaient les musulmans. Ils (les Saoudiens) ont aidé les communistes yéménites contre les Yéménites musulmans du Sud – la famille de Ben Laden est originaire du Yémen – et ils aident le régime d'Arafat à combattre le Hamas. Après avoir insulté et emprisonné les oulémas, le régime saoudien a perdu sa légitimité."

Ben Laden pensait manifestement qu'une grande trahison avait eu lieu. "Le peuple saoudien se souvient maintenant de ce que lui ont dit les oulémas, et il s'aperçoit que l'Amérique est la principale cause de ses problèmes. L'homme de la rue sait que son pays est le plus gros producteur de pétrole du monde, et pourtant il subit des impôts et ne bénéficie que de mauvais services. Le peuple comprend maintenant les discours des oulémas dans les mosquées – selon lesquels notre pays est devenu une colonie américaine. Il agit avec détermination pour chasser les Américains d'Arabie saoudite. Ce qui s'est passé à Riyad et à Khobar (vingt-quatre Américains tués dans deux bombardements) est une preuve manifeste de l'immense colère du peuple saoudien envers l'Amérique. Les Saoudiens savent maintenant que leur véritable ennemi est l'Amérique."

Les enquêteurs américains disent que plusieurs des pirates de l'air de la semaine dernière étaient saoudiens. Et Ben Laden a dit autre chose qui résonne maintenant pour moi de manière sinistre. "Si un kilogramme de TNT a explosé dans un pays dans lequel personne n'avait entendu d'explosion auparavant – il faisait allusion à l'Arabie saoudite –, l'explosion de 2 500 kilos de TNT à Khobar est assurément la preuve de la résistance du peuple à l'occupation américaine… En tant que musulmans, nous avons un grand sentiment de cohésion… Nous partageons la douleur de nos frères en Palestine et au Liban. L'explosion de Khobar n'est pas la conséquence directe de l'occupation américaine, mais la conséquence du comportement américain envers les musulmans." Il a parlé des milliers d'enfants qui mouraient en Irak du fait des sanctions des Nations unies. "Le fait de tuer ces enfants irakiens est une croisade contre l'islam. En tant que musulmans, nous n'aimons pas le régime irakien, mais nous pensons que le peuple irakien et ses enfants sont nos frères, et nous nous préoccupons de leur avenir."

Ben Laden était convaincu que, "tôt ou tard", les Américains quitteraient l'Arabie saoudite. "La guerre déclarée par l'Amérique contre le peuple saoudien signifie la guerre contre les musulmans partout dans le monde. La résistance contre l'Amérique va s'étendre à de multiples lieux dans les pays musulmans. Les chefs en qui nous avons confiance, les oulémas, nous ont donné une fatwa afin que nous chassions les Américains. La solution à cette crise est le retrait des troupes américaines. Leur présence militaire est une insulte au peuple saoudien."

En 1996, j'avais interrogé Ben Laden sur l'assassinat de dix-neuf Américains en Arabie saoudite, et il avait répondu que c'était "le début de la guerre entre les musulmans et les Etats-Unis". A propos du bombardement qui avait suivi, ayant entraîné la mort de vingt-quatre appelés américains, il devait me dire que c'était "une action magnifique à laquelle (il n'avait) pas eu l'honneur de participer."

Pendant les deux années qui ont suivi notre dernière rencontre, Ben Laden a formé son mouvement al-Qaeda et a déclaré la guerre au "peuple" américain – pas seulement au gouvernement et à l'armée des Etats-Unis. Suivirent le bombardement des ambassades des Etats-Unis à Nairobi et à Dar-es-Salaam, les attaques de missiles Cruise sur les camps de Ben Laden, le naufrage évité de justesse de l'USS Cole dans le port d'Aden. Il marche maintenant avec une canne – évolution du problème au pied que j'avais remarqué quatre ans plus tôt – et parle plus lentement. Et il porte cette robe dorée.

Mais peut-il réellement commander une armée de terroristes kamikazes depuis les montagnes désolées d'Afghanistan ? Il voulait instaurer la "véritable charia" au Moyen-Orient – il y aurait, je crois, encore plus de têtes coupées dans son Arabie – et il voulait la fin des dictateurs installés par les Américains, des hommes qui soutiennent la politique des Etats-Unis tout en réprimant leur peuple. Et j'ai l'impression que, pour des millions d'Arabes, c'était un message fort. On n'a pas besoin d'ordres de Ben Laden pour former un petit groupe de partisans, pour décider d'actions individuelles. Ben Laden n'a pas besoin de préparer des bombardements ou des renversements de régime. Je me demande donc – toujours en supposant que Ben Laden soit lié au crime contre l'humanité commis la semaine dernière – s'il est même nécessaire de commander une organisation paramilitaire pour que de telles choses se produisent. Les Arabes sont assez en colère contre les injustices qu'ils reprochent aux Américains pour ne pas avoir besoin d'ordres venant d'Afghanistan. L'inspiration pourrait suffire. Je me suis demandé, en regardant les images de New York la semaine dernière, si Ben Laden n'était pas aussi étonné que moi de les voir. A supposer qu'il ait la télévision…

Robert Fisk
Traduit de l'anglais par Florence Lévy-Paoloni

Who is Bin Laden by Rahimullah Yusufza i

There was, however, one significant element missing from his list of  grievances: he did not say anything about the idea of America - its rights, its freedoms, its prosperity. It was in American foreign policy that he saw  the greatest threat to Islam. Indeed, he criticized the west for supporting  dictators and authoritarian regimes in Islamic countries simply because it  suited their interests. There have been rumours that Mullah Omar has married Bin Laden's  daughter or sister, or vice versa. But though we have made endless  enquiries, we have never obtained proof.  The leader finds himself balancing the need to save his country with the  need to uphold Afghan tradition regarding the hosting of such an   honored guest. And Bin Laden, of course, has nowhere to go.

The fax rolled off the machine into the offices of Al-Jazeera Television on Sunday, and a world preparing for war paused for a moment to read it. Signed Osama bin Laden, it looked like a call to arms from the FBI's most wanted man, calling on "our beloved brothers" to "triumph over the infidel forces and the forces of tyranny, and to destroy the new Jewish-Christian crusader campaign on the soil of Pakistan and Afghanistan." Bin Laden, it seemed, was preparing for war.

We may never know if the fax came from his pen. But from my meetings and phone calls in recent years with him, I believe I have glimpsed his state of mind. It is three years ago now that the first call came to my office at The News in Peshawar, summoning me to a camp in southern Afghanistan. The Pakistani border guards would not let us cross, so the Islamist militant group who had organised the meeting smuggled us in. We waited for three days until finally, on May 25 1998, we met Bin Laden - a softly spoken man who drank copious amounts of water, because of a kidney problem, as we later discovered.

He had brought me there to announce the launch of his International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the United States and Israel - but the Taliban had not approved the announcement, and were furious. Mullah Omar angrily insisted that there could only be one ruler of Afghanistan - Bin Laden or himself.

Bin Laden apologised, and for my next meeting with him, a one-to-one interview on December 23 the same year, he was sure to obtain the approval of his protectors. I had had one communication with him since our first meeting, on the day of America's attack in August 1998 in retaliation for the African embassy bombings. The Egyptian Jihad leader Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri had telephoned me at my office. Bin Laden was sitting next to him, Al-Zawahiri said, and wanted to stress that he was not involved in the bombings, though he was pleased by them. An hour after the US attack, he called back: they had survived the attack on Bin Laden's camp, Al-Zawahiri said, and were ready for war.

The second time I met him, he seemed the complete opposite of the man we have been led to imagine in recent weeks. He was polite, quiet, very civilised, and shy: after I had taken a few photographs, he begged me to stop. I particularly remember the softness of his hands. They spoke of a wealthy background, of never having done much physical work.

We talked for four hours, through the night, drinking tea. He carefully denied involvement in the US embassy bombings, but said he felt joy that they had happened, and I took that as an indirect admission. He said it was not his job to organise such attacks; it was his job to create awareness about the injustices done by the US to Muslims, to provoke and incite Muslims against America. And he was happy that his message seemed to be getting through. He would certainly say the same now about the attacks of September 11. But though he might want to contact the media, he cannot. That would infuriate the Taliban, and he needs them desperately.

At that second meeting, we spoke about what he was fighting for, and what he hated. At first, he told me, he had been opposed to the Americans because of their military presence in Saudi Arabia and because he felt they were too near to Mecca. That was a provocation to the entire Muslim world, he said.

But once those early encounters in his homeland had stoked his feelings, he came to concentrate more on America's involvement in the Middle East. He declared a jihad against America and Israel jointly, he said, because he believed Israel was killing and punishing Palestinians with American money and American arms.

There was, however, one significant element missing from his list of grievances: he did not say anything about the idea of America - its rights, its freedoms, its prosperity. It was in American foreign policy that he saw the greatest threat to Islam. Indeed, he criticised the west for supporting dictators and authoritarian regimes in Islamic countries simply because it suited their interests.

Whatever their origins, Bin Laden's views have caught part of the popular Muslim imagination. In the west, one view is heard - the elitist one which dismisses him as an extremist and a terrorist. But then there is the common view, held by people who do not read the English press, and they are fascinated by Bin Laden because he has challenged America.

The name Osama has always been rare in northern Pakistan. Now, though, it is growing fast in popularity among parents choosing names for their children. In Pakistani cities, firms are named after him, too: Osama Medical Stores; Osama Property Services.

But that support may meet its match in US military strength. The Taliban face losing their country because of their support for one person. And that will place pressure on the central political relationship in Afghanistan: that between Bin Laden and the Taliban's religious leader, Mullah Omar.

I first met Mullah Omar in Kandahar in March 1995, the first journalist to do so. He admitted me to his office, where he was seated on the ground with his fellow Taliban, although later, when he was made spiritual leader, they built a platform to elevate him above his compatriots.

He was a very simple man, a village clergyman: heavily built, not very articulate, a shy person who seemed to know little about the world. His right eye had been damaged by shrapnel after a battle with Soviet troops. He told me he had been a great marksman in his time, attacking Russian forces with anti-tank missiles. He said he was 35, though he looked older.

Mullah Omar - originally a small-time military commander - met Bin Laden in 1996, by which time the Saudi was renowned for his financial gifts to wounded Afghan soldiers. After some initial mutual suspicion, the Taliban allowed Bin Laden to stay. But I do not believe that the two were ever close friends. There have been rumours that Mullah Omar has married Bin Laden's daughter or sister, or vice versa. But though we have made endless enquiries, we have never obtained proof.

Mullah Omar might be relieved if Bin Laden left Afghanistan, but the Taliban have given their word, and they will be bound by it. The leader finds himself balancing the need to save his country with the need to uphold Afghan tradition regarding the hosting of such an honoured guest. And Bin Laden, of course, has nowhere to go.

What Mullah Omar and Bin Laden share, more than anything, is an absolute certainty that Allah will stay with them and support them no matter how great the superpower that attacks them. I have not spoken to Mullah Omar or to Osama Bin Laden since the events of September 11, but I have spoken several times with senior Taliban figures. I doubt their claims that 300,000 people have signed up to fight, and they will have difficulty convincing their exhausted people that they should fight another war. But an American attack would be an enormous provocation to the Afghan people, motivating many of those who would not normally support the leadership. Afghanistan is waiting for war.
 

Bin Laden's family condemn US attacks

Source: AAP|Published: Saturday September 15, 9:50 AM

LONDON, Sept 14 AFP - The family of Osama bin Laden condemned Tuesday's attacks on the United States saying they “contradict the basic precepts of Islam” in Saturday's publication of the international Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat .

“Speaking for myself and all the members of bin Laden's family I express in strongest possible terms, our con demnation of the painful attacks which victimised innocent men, children and women,” said bin Laden's elder brother Abd alla Awad bin Laden.

Issuing his condemnation in the London-based daily newspaper, Abdalla Awad bin Laden said: “We consider those acts an unspeakable contravention of the principles of our religion and they stand to be condemned b y any and all religions and by humanity at large.

“We take this opportunity to confirm what we had already decl ared on the 19th February 1994, that the family of bin Laden renounces Osama's deeds and stratagems and has absolutely nothing to do with them.”

Osama bin Laden has been widely pinpointed as the chief suspect for masterminding the hijackin g of four planes this week, two of which crashed into the World Trade Centre, with a third one flying into the Pentagon

CIA: L'espionnage des Etats-Unis en Asie centrale est un mythe

Rueul marc gerecht est un ancien agent de la CIA. Traduit de l'anglais (Etats-Unis) par Sylvette Gleize. © The Atlantic Monthly. par Rueul Marc Gerecht

ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 30.09.01

LES Etats-Unis ont consacré des milliards de dollars au contre-terrorisme depuis le bombardement des ambassades américaines en Tanzanie et au Kenya, en août 1998. Des dizaines de millions ont été dépensés en opérations clandestines visant en particulier Oussama Ben Laden et son organisation terroriste Al-Qaida. Les hauts fonctionnaires américains affirment avec aplomb - même après l'attentat-suicide d'octobre dernier contre le USS-Cole dans le port d'Aden - que la CIA (l'Agence centrale de renseignement) et le FBI (le Bureau fédéral d'enquêtes) sont en train de secrètement "démembrer" l'organisation de Ben Laden.

Ayant, pour ma part, travaillé à la CIA sur les affaires du Proche-Orient pendant près de neuf ans (j'ai quitté la direction des opérations en raison des déconvenues liées aux nombreux problèmes que connaît l'Agence), je dirais que le programme contre-terroriste de l'Amérique au Proche-Orient et dans les pays voisins est un mythe.

Peshawar, capitale de la frontière nord-ouest du Pakistan, est aux limites culturelles du Proche-Orient. Elle est située sur les grandes routes au débouché de la légendaire passe de Khyber, porte de l'Afghanistan. C'est à Peshawar que Ben Laden a fait ses premières armes dans le djihad islamique, lorsque, au milieu des années 1980, il est devenu le financier et le logisticien du Maktab al-Khidamat, le Bureau des services, organisation officielle dont l'objectif était de recruter et d'apporter une aide aux volontaires musulmans, pour la plupart arabes, dans la guerre contre les Soviétiques en Afghanistan. Les amitiés et les liens noués au sein du Bureau des services ont donné naissance à l'organisation clandestine Al-Qaida, "La Base", qui a pour but avoué de livrer un djihad contre l'Occident, les Etats-Unis notamment.

Selon certains contacts afghans et des fonctionnaires pakistanais, les hommes de Ben Laden passent régulièrement par Peshawar, qu'ils utilisent comme point de rencontre téléphonique, centre de télécopie et autres moyens modernes de communication avec le monde extérieur. Les équipes qui ont bombardé les ambassades américaines en Afrique avaient probablement prévu de retourner se réfugier au Pakistan. Elles auraient été là vraisemblablement accueillies à bras ouverts par Ben Laden, grâce aux nombreux amis que compte Al-Qaida à Peshawar. Chaque tribu, chaque région d'Afghanistan est représentée dans cette ville que dominent les Pathans, tribu prééminente à la frontière nord-ouest du Pakistan et dans le sud de l'Afghanistan. Peshawar constitue aussi un réseau d'influence pour les dirigeants fondamentalistes en Afghanistan, les talibans. Connaître à fond cette ville est indispensable si les Etats-Unis veulent capturer Ben Laden ou se débarrasser de lui et de ses proches compagnons. Le recueil d'informations sur Al-Qaida n'aura de réelle valeur que si le réseau d'agents couvre Peshawar.

Lors d'un récent séjour, au coucher du soleil, quand les ruelles monacales de la cité plongent dans l'obscurité, à l'exception de rares zones où luit une enseigne au néon, je déambulais dans le quartier afghan. Même dans le noir, j'ai éprouvé la pire sensation qu'un agent des renseignements puisse avoir : des regards me suivaient partout. Pour échapper à cette foule, j'entrais dans n'importe quelle boutique de tapis, d'objets de cuivre ou de bijoux, dans tous les cybercafés que je pouvais trouver - des réduits d'une ou deux pièces en étage, chichement éclairés, où des hommes jeunes surfaient sur les films pornos de l'Occident. Où que j'aille, cette sensation m'accompagnait. Je ne vois pas comment la CIA, telle qu'elle est aujourd'hui, aurait la moindre chance de mener une opération contre Ben Laden à Peshawar, "cité des Doges" de l'Asie centrale.

Pas un Occidental ne pénétrera sans se faire repérer dans ce monde musulman du parpaing et de la brique d'argile séchée - d'où les fantassins de Ben Laden sont issus pour la plupart. Nul officier des renseignements basé au Pakistan ne s'introduira ni dans les communautés afghanes de Peshawar ni dans les nombreuses écoles coraniques de la frontière nord-ouest, qui alimentent en hommes et en idées Ben Laden et les talibans. On ne peut sérieusement espérer recueillir là des renseignements utiles sur le terrorisme islamiste - sans parler d'y recruter des agents.

Un envoyé musulman de la CIA parlant la langue du pays (et l'Agence ne dispose, au dire de plusieurs représentants du service actif, que de très peu d'hommes issus des milieux proche-orientaux) ne pourrait d'ailleurs, dans cet environnement, guère faire mieux qu'un Américain cent pour cent blond aux yeux bleus.

Les agents de renseignement n'échappent pas longtemps à l'ambassade et aux consulats pour lesquels ils travaillent. Photographié, enregistré par les services locaux de la sécurité, un tel agent n'ira pas loin sans que son pays n'en soit informé, surtout au Pakistan, où la police est partout. Celui qui cherche à se faire passer pour natif du lieu, et prétend être un vrai musulman radical en quête de frères travaillant pour la cause, se ridiculisera rapidement. Au Pakistan, où l'Agence de renseignement inter-services du gouvernement et l'armée au pouvoir sont aussi compétentes qu'opiniâtres, la CIA ne peut pas grand-chose si ces institutions lui sont contraires. Et elles le sont. Pour ce qui concerne les talibans et Oussama Ben Laden, le Pakistan et les Etats-Unis ne sont pas des alliés. Les relations entre les deux pays sont mauvaises depuis des années, en raison de l'opposition américaine à la volonté couronnée de succès du Pakistan de se doter de l'arme nucléaire et, plus récemment, au soutien d'Islamabad aux séparatistes musulmans du Cachemire. La présence de Ben Laden en Afghanistan en tant qu'"hôte" des talibans soutenus par le Pakistan a encore accru la méfiance et les soupçons dont ces relations étaient empreintes. Autrement dit, les renseignements américains n'ont pas obtenu et n'obtiendront pas l'aide du Pakistan dans leur recherche de Ben Laden. Le seul moyen efficace de mener des opérations contre-terroristes offensives à l'endroit des islamistes sur un territoire qui leur est plus ou moins hostile serait d'utiliser des "agents clandestins non officiels" - qui ne dépendent en rien ouvertement du gouvernement américain. Imaginez James Bond sans les gadgets, les femmes, le Walther PPK et sans l'Aston Martin. Mais depuis 1999, aucun programme d'infiltration d'une organisation fondamentaliste islamique par des non-officiels n'a été mis en place à l'étranger, indique l'un de ces agents qui ont servi au Proche-Orient. "Les non-officiels n'ont en réalité absolument pas changé depuis la guerre froide, m'a-t-il confié récemment. Nous sommes toujours de faux hommes d'affaires qui vivent dans de grandes maisons. Nous n'allons pas prier dans les mosquées." Un ancien responsable de la division du Proche-Orient indique que "la CIA ne dispose sans doute d'aucun agent qualifié d'origine proche-orientale parlant vraiment arabe et capable de jouer de façon crédible le rôle d'un fondamentaliste musulman prêt à passer des années de sa vie à avaler une nourriture infecte, sans la moindre femme, dans les montagnes d'Afghanistan. Grâce à Dieu, les officiers de renseignement habitent, pour la plupart, des quartiers résidentiels en Virginie. Nous ne faisons pas ce genre de choses". Un jeune agent va plus loin encore : "Les missions où on attrape la diarrhée n'existent pas." Les opérations de contre-terrorisme de l'autre côté des lignes adverses sont tout simplement trop risquées pour que des hommes de la CIA y participent directement. Du temps où j'étais à la direction des opérations, l'Agence déployait une petite armée d'officiers pour une entrevue avec un étranger susceptible d'être dangereux si on ne le rencontrait pas entre les murs sécurisés d'une ambassade ou d'un consulat américains. Pour les agents qui sont restés dans le service clandestin, l'esprit bureaucratique de l'Agence et son peu de penchant pour le risque - qui, à l'évidence, reflètent l'aversion grandissante de la société américaine pour le danger physique - n'ont fait que s'accentuer. A quelques kilomètres du grand bazar de Peshawar, près de l'ancien cantonnement où les soldats britanniques faisaient autrefois l'exercice et où l'on trouve le consulat des Etats-Unis, l'American Club est traditionnellement le lieu de prédilection des personnels des services de l'aide internationale, des diplomates, des journalistes et des barbouzes. Les voyageurs occidentaux épuisés, de retour d'Afghanistan, s'y arrêtent souvent pour se détendre ; on peut y boire un verre, visionner des films vidéo, commander un steak. Les consignes de sécurité de l'ambassade sont affichées sur le tableau de l'entrée. Celles que j'y ai lues en décembre dernier conseillaient aux ressortissants américains et à leurs familles de se tenir à l'écart des foules, des mosquées et de tout lieu de rassemblement des Pakistanais et des Afghans dévots. Ces consignes renvoient exactement à la mentalité qui prévaut aussi bien au sein du département d'Etat qu'à la CIA. Des agents peuvent se risquer seuls à l'extérieur, mais leur curiosité n'est ni encouragée ni récompensée. Il y a fort peu de chances, sauf si un fantassin de Ben Laden passe les portes du consulat ou de l'ambassade des Etats-Unis, qu'un officier des services du contre-terrorisme voie jamais un seul d'entre eux. Hormis les difficultés propres au fondamentalisme et aux quartiers déshérités, la CIA s'est obstinément refusée à former des cadres spécialisés dans un ou deux pays. Tout au long de la guerre entre l'URSS et l'Afghanistan (1979-1989), la direction des opérations n'a mis sur pied aucune équipe d'experts afghans. Le premier agent de renseignement à avoir quelque connaissance de la langue du pays n'est arrivé qu'en 1987 en Afghanistan, un an et demi à peine avant la fin du conflit. Robert Baer, l'un des plus talentueux d'entre eux au Proche-Orient depuis vingt ans (et le seul à avoir recueilli dans les années 1980 de solides informations de première importance sur le Hezbollah libanais et le Djihad palestinien) a, au début des années 1990, laissé entendre au quartier général que la CIA pourrait avoir besoin de renseignements sur l'Afghanistan et devrait aller les chercher à partir des Républiques voisines d'Asie centrale qui avaient appartenu à l'Union soviétique. La réponse du quartier général fut celle-ci : trop dangereux. Pourquoi se donner cette peine ? La guerre froide avait pris fin dans la région avec le retrait des Soviétiques en 1989. L'Afghanistan était bien trop loin, les guerres d'extermination réciproque endémiques, estimait-on, et l'islam radical une idée abstraite. L'Afghanistan est, depuis, devenu le centre névralgique et le terrain d'entraînement du terrorisme islamique contre les Etats-Unis. Le service clandestin de la CIA continue d'ailleurs, d'une manière générale, de ne pas laisser ses agents plus de deux à trois ans sur le rapport afghan. Jusqu'en octobre 1999, pas un officier de la CIA n'a rendu visite à Ahmed Shah Massoud, en Afghanistan. Massoud était le dirigeant du nord-est du pays et le commandant des seules forces armées à s'opposer encore aux talibans. Il fut le chef le plus accompli de la guérilla que les moudjahidins ont menée contre les Soviétiques ; son armée est à l'heure actuelle quotidiennement confrontée aux unités militaires arabes qui combattent sous la bannière de Ben Laden ; pourtant, aucun agent de renseignement de la CIA n'a encore interrogé ses soldats sur les lignes de front, ni les combattants de la guerre sainte - pakistanais, afghans, sino-turkmènes et arabes - qu'ils ont fait prisonniers. Au cours des années que j'ai passées à l'Agence, jamais une fois je n'ai entendu les officiers de renseignement, à l'étranger ou au quartier général, discuter d'une opération élémentaire de recrutement contre une cible proche-orientale, qui utiliserait un agent de renseignement loin des cercles diplomatiques et des milieux d'affaires. On n'a tout simplement jamais pensé à l'avenir. George Tenet, qui a pris la direction de la CIA en 1997, a qualifié à plusieurs reprises le programme contre-terroriste américain de "solide", déclarant qu'il avait dans la plupart des cas "déstabilisé" et inquiété les terroristes de Ben Laden. Le directeur du contre-terrorisme au Conseil pour la sécurité nationale de l'administration Clinton, Richard Clarke, qui avec Bush continue de régner, est convaincu qu'en Afghanistan Ben Laden et ses hommes restent éveillés la nuit "autour du brasero, très anxieux du sort que nous leur réservons". Je doute qu'Oussama Ben Laden et les siens aient du mal à trouver le sommeil.

Essay on Osama Ben Laden: From two perspective, Con and Pro. You choose.

1. 'America represents global capitalism'

By Joseph S. Nye, 9/16/2001 Joseph S. Nye is dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard

Osama bin Laden, suspected architect of various terrorist attacks against the United States, including last Tuesday's horror, has repeatedly called for Muslims worldwide to join in his holy. He is quoted as saying, ''I'm fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God. Our fight now is against the Americans.''

Ironically, the United States helped to create bin Laden and his followers. We trained some of the mujahadeen who fought a holy war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the l980s.1980s. Other of bin Laden's supporters developed a deep resentment of the presence of US troops in Saudia Arabia during and after the Gulf War a decade ago.

In their eyes, the American presence defiled the home of Islam's holiest shrines. Bin Laden has also appealed to those who have been radicalized by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as recent photos showed. For this implacable hard core, hatred of the United States is deeply rooted.

But not everyone hates us, nor is bin Laden the only catalyst for terror. The Aum Shinrikyo cult that spread chemical poisons in the Tokyo subway system a few years ago was interested in fomenting a war between the United States and Japan. And Timothy McVeigh was a homegrown product. The important question is whether such hard nuggets of hatred can broaden their appeal beyond their narrow band. The answer to that depends in part on what the United States represents and what it does.

For one thing, the United States is the most powerful country in the world, and our military has a global reach unlike any other country. For some, this makes us an important source of stability. Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, for example, believes that the presence of 100,000 US troops in East Asia has helped to provide the local balance of power that has been the security foundation for Asian economic growth.

For others (like Saddam Hussein) who want to upset the status quo in their regions, the presence of American forces is a hindrance. Since they cannot beat us, they are tempted to support terrorists who can try to undermine our will at home. This form of hatred and source of terrorism grows out of our role in thwarting the ambitions of local tyrants.

Others hate us because of our allies. American support for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, has become a source of tension with groups in countries like Libya, Syria, and Iran, which the State Department lists as harboring terrorists.

Some Americans may be tempted to believe that we could reduce these hatreds and our vulnerability if we would withdraw our troops, curtail our alliances, and follow a more isolationist foreign policy. But they would be mistaken. Fundamentalist groups would still resent the power of the American economy and culture. American corporations and citizens represent global capitalism, which is still anathema to them. It would make no sense to give such groups free rein in their regions while at the same time abandoning our allies.

Moreover, American popular culture has a global reach regardless of what we do. Some critics even see globalization as Americanization. While such views are too simplistic, there is no escaping the influence of Hollywood, Harvard, and CNN. In general, our culture has a positive effect and contributes to our attractive or ''soft'' power just as our military and economic might contribute to our ''hard'' power. American movies and television programs express freedom, individualism, and change (as well as sex and violence ). American higher education attracts half a million students from around the world every year. Unlike the classical empires of Rome and Britain where the culture extended only as far as the armies, American culture extends much further.

Generally, the global reach of American culture helps to enhance our ''soft'' power. But not for everyone. Individualism and liberties are attractive to many people, but repulsive to some fundamentalists. One of the suspected hijacker-pilots is reported to have said he did not like the United States because it is ''too lax. I can go anywhere I want to and they can't stop me.''

Others are repelled by American feminism and the changing role of women. Open sexuality and individual choices are profoundly subversive of staunchly patriarchal societies. Such conflicts mean that American culture can have both positive and negative effects in the same country. For example, at the same time that conservative mullahs in Iran are condemning the United States as the great Satan, some Iranian teenagers are surreptitiously watching smuggled cassettes of Hollywood movies. Indeed, for some conservatives the term '' great Satan'' refers less to our Fifth Fleet than to MTV.

In short, some people will hate us because of our values of openness and opportunity for change. But they are not likely to become a majority unless we ourselves fail to practice and live up to our values. Some tyrants and fundamentalists will always hate us, and we will have no choice but to deal with them through more effective counter-terrorism policies. But those hard nuggets of hate are unlikely to catalyze broad hatred unless we abandon our values and pursue policies that let the extremists appeal to the majority in the middle. And that is something we should keep in mind as we fashion our policy responses to this tragedy.

Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

by Michel Chossudovsky
Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa

Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), Montréal

A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that "Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects". CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan ``multiple attacks with little or no warning.'' Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of war" and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution."

Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: "When we reasonably determine our attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them -- minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage" -- and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror's national hosts".

The following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic "Jihad" to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.

Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders".

1

In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.

2:

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.

3

The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:

In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,...[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.

4

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:

Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.

5

Pakistan's Intelligence Apparatus

Pakistan's ISI was used as a "go-between". The CIA covert support to the "jihad" operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, --i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be "successful", Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the "jihad", which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.

In the words of CIA's Milton Beardman "We didn't train Arabs". Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs" had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA"

    6

CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help".

    7

Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.

With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government".

    8

 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000.

    9

Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:

'Relations between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence] had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia's ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime,'... During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984.... `the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.' Both Pakistan and the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military escalation was the best course.

10

The Golden Crescent Drug Triangle

The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin.

    11

In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":

    12

CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests ... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.' In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn't really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,'... `I don't think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout.... There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.'

13

In the Wake of the Cold War

In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World's opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.

14

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics-- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.

15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.

The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia."

16.

Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet Union.

Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also "handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions..."

17

And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI"

18

In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan's ISI.

19

In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.

No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of "the Sharia laws of punishment".

20

The War in Chechnya

With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war".

22

Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.

The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:

[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.

23

Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia"

24

Basayev's organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania's collapsed pyramids,

25

Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons.

During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander "Al Khattab" who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya".

26

Concluding Remarks

Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the World's foremost terrorist.

While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI --operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has --since the Soviet-Afghan war-- supported international terrorism through its covert operations.

In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad --featured by the Bush Adminstration as "a threat to America"-- is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

Clinton ( Good Old Bill)...(We took a picture together, but he never sent it to me, quel enc--er!)

According to CNN Clinton had plan to arrest or kill bin Laden

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday he had authorized a plan to arrest, and if necessary, kill accused terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden -- and had even contacted a group in Afghanistan to carry out the plan.

But that group was not successful, he said.

Speaking to reporters after he appeared in a news conference with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Clinton said his administration did everything it could do to stop bin Laden, who was accused of masterminding the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa while Clinton was president.

"We also trained commandos for a possible ground action, but we did not have the necessary intelligence to do it," he said.

Now, Clinton said, the United States has "support from people who would not have supported us then. And they give us more tactical options than were available then."

He said President Bush has a hard job in deciding what to do about bin Laden.

"There are a lot of operational issues about putting ground troops in there that I think will be still not easy, the president's still got some tough tactical calls to make, but I think he's clearly handling this in a very careful, deliberate and strong way," Clinton said.

Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders World Islamic Front Statement 23 February 1998

Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin
Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt
Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group
Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan
Fazlul Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh

Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.

The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."

On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it [EMPHASIS ADDED], in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."

This is in addition to the words of Almighty God: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"

We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.

Almighty God said: "O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."

Almighty God also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."

Almighty God also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."