|| -----Original Message-----
|| From:Doug Henwood
|| Yesterday, the Financial Times began a series investigating al Qaeda.
|| Not much new in yesterday's installment - haven't gotten to today's
|| yet - but it repeats the claim that 70,000 alums of al Q training
|| camps are scattered across 50 countries. Maybe this is a complete
|| crock, though the FT isn't exactly USA Today, and it doesn't make
|| much sense for the newspaper of the international bourgeoisie to lie
|| to its readers. But if anything like this is true, ObL & the Taliban
|| certainly bear responsibility for their trainees, no? And insofar as
|| they need coordination and finance for their bigger operations,
|| someone other than the direct perps has to know, right?
||
|| And if anything like the 70,000 number is true - divide it by 5 if
|| you want, and it's still a big number of people hellbent on
|| destruction - what do you pacifists and fatalists and revolutionary
|| defeatists suggest be done? Just let them be? Act nice? Invite them
|| over for coffee?
||
|| Doug
Erm, bomb Riyadh and Islamabad?
The Qaeda alumni in Afghanistan are indoctrinated with Saudi Wahhabism in Pakistani madrassas financed with Saudi money. They got their millitary and terrorist training from the US and UK, helped by Pakistan's SIS. Many of them were trained on military facilities on US and UK soil.
Come to think of it, many Qaeda members got indoctrinated in the USA, in places like the Maktab al-Khidamat branch office in Brooklyn, by people like Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who got _his_ education at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In fact, Sheikh Omar entered the US several times prior to attempting to blow up the WTC despite being blacklisted by the State Dept. And there's Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri in Great Britain who is wanted by Yemen for organizing terrorist attacks but the brits can't be bothered to extradite him. So what do you do, bomb Washington and London? Send the CIA and MI5 off to Guam to be tried-and-fried?
Qaeda is not an alien infestation and they aren't the creation of the usual suspects: Iran, Iraq, Libya, etc. Their ideology is a sect that was virtually invented by British intelligence. Their sponsor is Saudi Arabia, with sizeable contributions from other Gulf states. They were trained in the black arts of terrorism by the CIA, SAS, Saudi Istikhbarat, and Pakistani SIS. Thousands of Qaeda warriors, among which Pakistani SIS and army officers, were spirited out of Kunduz and are now in Pakistan, right under the noses of US military & CIA.
So contrary to popular belief, ObL & the Taliban are not that vital to Qaeda. The real culprits are sitting in Riyadh, Islamabad, Langley, and London.
Hakki