Last year, Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote:

We should be under no illusion that the biggest security threat to our country and other countries is the murderous agents of hate that work under the banner of al-Qaida.  (The Guardian March 22 2009)

Wow, it is hardly surprising that British taxpayers need to hand over more than forty billion a year to the military – and also have to maintain an ‘anti-terror’ police squad. (1) Or … could this be in large part imaginary, a kind of collectively-shared hallucination, what we might call the Phantom Menace? Would that be needed by a war-making civilisation like ours, to keep everyone scared? For that view, we quote here the wise cleric of the Birmingham mosque, Dr Naseem:   

I don’t think al-Qaeda exists because we Muslims all over the world have not known this organisation. The only information about this organisation is coming from the CIA. Now, the CIA is not known for telling the truth.

There are two books concerning the event of July 7th, 2005, which have chapters with a title, The Phantom Menace my book and that of Daniel Obachike, called The 4th Bomb. Who did it, who is the enemy? My ToT described how Al-Qaeda was assembled and formulated by the FBI in the late 1990s (ToT, p.214) – ‘when no Muslim organization called itself by that name’. Maybe John Pilger is right to argue:

Western war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the antiwar instincts of their own citizens.

– quoting from another fine essay of his about those who are trying to kick-start WW3. Fear is the message and, war, alas, is the purpose.

On the day of July 7th, 2005, Labour MP Robin Cook wrote,

So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation.

Those were wise words written on that historic day! We should remember them. His article further explained how ‘Al-Qaeda’ only meant ‘the database’ and was Bin Laden’s list of persons working under him. Cook was the one person who had the authority to challenge Blair over the ‘War on Terror’ narrative within the parliamentary Labour party – and he was dead a week after writing this (he died suddenly of a ‘heart attack’ while out walking on a family holiday). Thus the Empire works, ‘through force and make-believe.’

BBC Admits, Al-qaeda never existed                                                                            27 December 2009

Britain’s Al-Qaeda expert is surely Jason Burke, who wrote Al-qaeda, Casting a Shadow of Terror’ in 2003 (2). On a BBC documentary, September 2009, viewers were staggered to hear him explain how ‘There is no al-Qaeda organization … it simply does not exist.’ Britain and America have been ‘chasing a phantom enemy’ for all these years. The West has dreamed it up, as if it had ‘tentacles that spread out to sleeper cells’ in various nations. Gosh! Burke characterized this as the great Osama bin Laden myth, as if he were walled up in a great ‘fortress that did not exist’ in the Tora Bora mountains. His video shows how British and American troops invading Afghanistan in 2001 had to admit that they could not find al-Qaeda to fight – because, as Burke explained, it wasn’t there…

Too right Mr Burke – and thank you for saying that! That’s why the Phantom Menace is such an important modern concept. The British army is fighting a war against an enemy that does not as such exist, which is why it can’t ever ‘win.’ It will soon be a bunch of sitting ducks protecting a US pipeline; is that why it’s there? Fake terror has continually to be generated, to make the populations of the US/UK compliant in what are in effect colonial wars of Empire. Otherwise the British  people might start to wonder, as to whether there is not some more enjoyable way of spending forty billion a year?

The US presently has a ‘burn’ of five million dollars an hour for its Afghan war – altogether it is spending twenty million dollars an hour on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Also, the biggest UK army base since WW2 (according to Wikipedia) is in Helmand province in Afghanistan. 90% of the world’s opium/cocaine comes from that poppy cultivation area, which gives a huge source of liquid or invisible income for whoever is cultivating it: tens of billions of dollars or opium from Afghanistan alone – in effect, managing the world’s heroin supply. The Taliban had succeeded in stamping out the opium poppy production in 2000, then after 9/11 and the US/UK occupation it was back to business as usual! Now under ‘NATO’ auspices its numero uno for cannabis as well as Heroin: the British army needs a story as to what it is doing there – a shared myth about who we have to hate.

Bin Laden – still dead after all these years

Osama Bin Laden died on or around 14 December 2001, of kidney failure in the Tora Bora mountains. He had a funeral, produced a will – that sort of thing. Rather final. Complete termination of his radio and phone messages then happened. One wishes that politicians could finally bring themselves to appreciate this simple fact. Can they kindly stop making fatuous remarks about trying to catch him? They would then have to face up to the staggering sequence of about forty manufactured fake OBL videos. That would indeed be a beneficial exercise for them. Who has produced them – with all those bored-looking OBL lookalikes? To a large degree the ISI (Pakistani intelligence) has indeed collaborated with the CIA in making these. This has encouraged the fairy tale that Bin Laden was lurking in the mountains of Eastern Pakistan. The dire consequence of this arrives, in the form of drone attacks by the US military, allegedly ‘taking out’ Al-Qaeda cells in Pakistan.

‘Osama Bin Laden, Dead or Alive?’ is the title of last year’s book by that wise 9/11-expert professor David Ray Griffin. A BBC Conspiracy Files program about Bin Laden (January 2010) used this title. It characterised his view (of OBL dying nine years ago) a ‘conspiracy theory’ and had it opposed by various intel agents and US military experts. It admitted that no authentic sightings or other evidence of his existence had surfaced since December 2001; however, it ducked the question, of whether or not he was responsible for making 9/11 happen. But, that is central to his identity. OBL put out three or four statements post-9/11 denying he had had any involvement in the event and these were his last-ever messages. Like the character Emmanuel Goldstein in Orwell’s 1984, he has been made to live on after death as a hate-and-fear character, a bogeyman who provides ‘menacing’ messages as required.

People are startled when they realize what voice morphing technology can do. Have a laugh here: the faking of so many OBL videos must have consequences for our perception of the posthumous confession-videos of two of the London ‘bombers’ Sid Khan, and Schezad Tanweer. (http://www.wanttoknow.info/060123psyops ) My book quotes a longtime friend of Sid Khan who firmly stated that the voice on that posthumous video did not belong to Khan.

Article Excerpts

1 “Hunt for Bin Laden a National shame’                                       Veterans Today, December 2009

The embarassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific.  He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn’t nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.

However … Since we spent 200 million dollars on “special ops” looking for someone we knew was dead, who is going to jail for that?  Since Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney continually talked about a man they knew was dead, now known to be for reasons of POLITICAL nature, who is going to jail for that?  Why were tapes brought out, now known to be forged, as legitimate intelligence to sway the disputed 2004 election in the US? …

The bin Laden scam is one of the most shameful acts ever perpetrated against the American people.  We don’t even know if he really was an enemy, certainly he was never the person that Bush and Cheney said.  In fact, the Bush and bin Laden families were always close friends and had been for many years.

What kind of man was Osama bin Laden?  This one time American ally against Russia, son of a wealthy Saudi family, went to Afghanistan to help them fight for their freedom.  America saw him as a great hero then.  Transcripts of the real bin Laden show him to be much more moderate than we claim, angry at Israel and the US government but showing no anger toward Americans and never making the kind of theats claimed.  All of this is public record for any with the will to learn.

We know this:  Bin Laden always denied any ties to 9/11 and, in fact, has never been charged in relation to 9/11.  …We, instead, showed films made by paid actors, made up to look somewhat similar to bin Laden, actors who contradicted bin Ladens very public statements, actors pretending to be bin Laden long after bin Laden’s death…

For years, we attacked the government of Pakistan for not hunting down someone everyone knew was dead.  Bin Laden’s death hit the newspapers in Pakistan on December 15, 2001.  How do you think our ally felt when they were continually berated for failing to hunt down and turn over someone who didn’t exist?

2. London’s “Daily Mail” asks  whether Osama bin Laden is Dead, September 11, 2009

 What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff? What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake – and that he is being kept ‘alive’ by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Indeed – and how were the world’s media so gullible? The Mail quotes academics who point out that the early, verifiable videotapes of bin Laden do not match the post- 2001 tapes: ‘Telltale distinguishing features include changed facial structure and increasing secularism in the content of the messages.’ The Mail commented on DRG’s new book:

‘A reason to suspect that all of the post-2001 Bin Laden tapes are fabrications is that they often appeared at times that boosted the Bush presidency or supported a claim by its chief ‘war on terror’ ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

– and concluded, ‘For years, Bin Laden has been the central plank of the West’s ‘war on terror’. Could it be that, for years, he’s just been smoke and mirrors?’

It could indeed, and let’s hope that people get angry as this dawns upon them.

3. This war on terror has been about scaring people, not protecting them’The Guardian (concerning the ‘Christmas bomber’)

 ‘The ease with which the plane bomber could operate exposes the vacuity and recklessness at the heart of the US response to 9/11′

So there was no ticking time bomb. No urgent need ever arose to torture anybody who was withholding crucial details, so that civilisation as we know it could be saved in the nick of time. No wires had to be tapped, special prisons erected or international accords violated. No innocent people had to be grabbed off the street in their home country, transported across the globe and waterboarded. Drones, daisy-cutters, invasions, occupations were, it has transpired, not necessary. Indeed, when it actually came down to it, to forestall a near-calamitous terrorist atrocity in the US the authorities didn’t even have to go in search of information or informants. The alleged terrorist’s father came to the US embassy in Nigeria of his own free will and warned them that his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had disappeared and could be in the company of Yemeni terrorists. Meanwhile the National Security Agency had heard that al-Qaida in Yemen was planning to use an unnamed Nigerian in an attack on the US. If that were not enough, then came Abdulmutallab himself, a 23-year-old Nigerian bound for Detroit who bought his ticket in cash, checked in no bags and left no contact information. For seven years the American state manipulated the public with its multicoloured terror alerts. But when all the warning lights were flashing red, it did nothing.’

For an ‘Axis of Peace view about how international terror comes into being these days, see here.  The former Chief of Russian Military Staff  General Leonid Ivashov stated:

terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its “godfather”.

Yep, afraid so…

Refs

  1. For a right-wing Tory viewpoint see Celsius 7/7, by British MP Michael Gove. This will accept all of the US/UK military myths put out – the war-ratifying illusions. (Its title alludes to the Ray Bradbury classic, Fahrenheit 451…)
  2. My essay on The Last Days of Bin Laden has: ‘a shelfload of untrue books about OBL exist, of which Jason Burke’s Al-qaeda the true story of Radical Islam is only the most recent.’  His book did I felt rather buy into current terror mythology – of how the 9/11 event had been perpetrated by Osama Bin Laden and so forth. But, all is forgiven with this brilliant TV statement of his. (NB this is one of my five five 9/11 essays that jim Fetzer has reposted.

7.4.2010

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