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Thursday, 30th July 2009

I wrote yesterday about concerns that Iran might be pulling the strings of an illusory peace in Iraq. Brace yourselves – I have long had concerns about other alliances.

One of the many absurd mantras of the ‘we were taken to war in Iraq on a lie’ brigade is their belief that, in the Muslim and Arab world, everyone stays within their own silos. Thus Saddam could never have been working with al Qaeda because Saddam was secular and al Qaeda are religious fanatics; thus Hamas/al Qaeda could never be working with Hezbollah because Sunni and Shia are mortal enemies; thus since Iran poses a mortal threat to the world we should have attacked Iran, not Iraq.

It has always seemed to me, however, that ‘either/or’ in these circumstances is wildly inappropriate. Even mortal enemies form alliances against a foe that is common to both. We saw that with the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact in World War Two. Today, Sunni and Shia, Ba’athists and Iran are united against America, Israel and the western world.

Just because Iran poses a threat to the world doesn’t mean that Saddam did not also pose a threat in himself on account of the triple lock of support for terror, regional ambition and development of WMD programmes – a threat which I believed then to be well-founded and still do.

There was never any evidence that Saddam was involved in 9/11; there was evidence that he had contacts, although no evidence they were operational, with al Qaeda. This is stated in both the US 9/11 report and the British Butler report. Now this article based on an interview with Matthew Degn, a former civilian interrogator attached to the U.S. Army in Iraq, states:

When asked about recent media reports citing Saddam Hussein's denial to the FBI about links to al Qaeda Degn viewed these reports as part of an ongoing attempt to rewrite history saying these reports stand in stark contrast to what he saw and heard firsthand in Iraq. In fact, Degn said that to many of the detainees links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorist groups including al Qaeda was not even a point of contention but freely acknowledged. Many of the high value detainees took it as a given that their captors were aware of Iraq-al Qaeda links. Some even bragged about those links.

... When pressed for specifics Degn said that Hussein’s regime, like many other Middle Eastern groups, used the ‘Hawala’ system to secretly move money to al Qaeda and made it nearly impossible to ‘prove’ in a legal system that the transfers took place. The ‘Hawala’ system uses multiple layers of middle men couriers to transfer money and leaves no paper trail, making tracing such transactions virtually impossible.

Degn said that Iraqi assistance given to al Qaeda also included safehaven. Degn said al Qaeda used that safehaven for at least two training camps in Western Iraq and the Anbar province. Degn argued that Saddam Hussein’s government was certainly aware that the provision of safehaven was being used for these camps. (Related: Captured Iraqi terrorist says al Qaeda had camps in Saddam's Iraq)

Degn said he had heard reports that indicated that al Qaeda affiliates had multiple, possibly competing, cells in Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. One cell was affiliated with Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who had not yet ‘officially’ sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Another al Qaeda cell, linked to Ayman al Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was reportedly simultaneously operating in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

We know that al Qaeda was trained, supported and sheltered by the Taleban. But I have long suspected that somewhere in the planning of the 9/11 attacks was also Iran: most particularly in the shape of Imad Mughniyeh, the senior Hezbollah commander who was killed in Damascus by unknown assassins last year. I have no evidence to back this up, only a hunch based on the fact that Mughniyeh was held to be the most brilliant terrorist mastermind of all and that elements within the intelligence world thought his fingerprints were all over 9/11.

Scrolling through Google just now, I happened upon this article in Jane’s on September 19, 2001:

Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers believe, were two of the world’s foremost terrorist masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden.

Now there are reports that Iran was involved with the Taleban – before 9/11. This article by Thomas Joscelyn is based on unclassified documents prepared by the US government for Guantanamo detainee Khirullah Said Wali Khairkhwa:

According to the US government’s unclassified files, Khairkhwa was installed as the governor of Herat ‘to improve relations between Iran and the Taliban government.’ By his own admission, Khairkhwa began meeting with the Iranians in early 2000. The US government’s unclassified documents cite at least two instances when Khairkhwa took part in meetings between senior Taliban and Iranian officials: one on Jan. 7, 2000, and a second time in late 2001.

The government’s Oct. 7, 2005, ARB summary of evidence memo for Khairkhwa (see here) includes this allegation:

‘On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hikmatyar faction officials. Present at the meeting were Afghan Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin leader, Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and Ayman Al-Zawahiri [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan and strengthening the Taliban’s ties with [the] Iran[ian] government.’

The government’s second and more recent ARB summary of evidence memo (dated June 16, 2006) modified this allegation. US intelligence officials did not allege that Hekmatyar or Zawahiri personally attended the meeting. (See here.) Instead, the government’s allegation reads:

‘On 7 January 2000, the detainee and three other Taliban officials attended a meeting with Iranian and Hizbi Islami-Gulbuddin Hekmatyar faction officials [emphasis added]. Topics of discussion included United States intervention in the region, restoration of peace in Afghanistan, and strengthening the Taliban’s nascent ties with Iran.’

As with all such shadowy information, one has to be very careful before reaching any conclusions. But in this world of deeply complex alliances and internecine warfare --some of which takes place with the same players simultaneously -- it could be that both Iran and Iraq were involved at one time or another with al Qaeda.

The full story has yet to be written. But what is undeniably true is that the Islamic jihad is an umbrella movement comprising not just one or two but many actors, all with their own sub and sub-sub agendas, all fighting and allying and fighting with each other again, but all with the same ultimate objective: to conquer the non-Islamic or not-Islamic-enough world. Until and unless we realise that one key fact, we won’t even begin to understand what we’re up against.

The picture is ''The Prussian Tribute in Moscow' published in the satirical newspaper "Mucha' on September 8 1939, Warsaw

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Ronnie

July 30th, 2009 9:45pm

Gosh, makes you think...

Linda Smith

July 31st, 2009 1:30am

Jacques Ellul, French jurist, historian, theologian and sociologist writing in 1983 in the Preface to Bat Yeor's book on Dhimmitude:

"....The Muslim peoples had no power; they were extraordinarily divided and many of them were subjected to European civilization. Those Europeans who were hostile to colonization showed some sympathy for the "Arabs", but that was as far as it went! And then, suddenly, since 1950, everything changed completely.
I think that one can discern four stages in this development. The first was the attempt of the Islamic peoples to rid themselves of their conquerors. In this, the Muslims were by no means "original": the Algerian war and all that followed was only a consequence of the first war against the French in Vietnam. It was part of a general process of decolonization. This process, in turn, led the Islamic people to search for their own identity, to seek to be not only free of the Europeans but different, qualitatively different from them. This led to the second step: that which was specific to these peoples was not an ethnic or organizational peculiarity, but a religion. Accordingly, even in left-wing socialist or communist movements in the Muslim world there was a return to religion, so that the idea of a secular state such as Atat�rk, for instance, had envisaged was completely rejected. The explosion of Islamic religiosity is frequently considered specific to the Ayatollah Khomeini, but that is not correct. One ought no to forget that the terrible war of 1947 in India between the Muslims and Hindus was fought on a purely religious basis. More than one million people died, and since massacres had not taken place when the Muslims had lived within the Hindu-Buddhist orbit, one may presume that the war was caused by the attempt to set up an independent Islamic republic. Pakistan officially proclaimed itself an Islamic Republic in 1953, precisely at the time when other Muslim peoples were making their great effort to regain their identity. This was the third stage in the Islamic revival. Of course, one ought not to overlook all the conflicts between Muslim states, their divergences of interests and even wars, but these differences should not blind us to a more fundamental reality: their religious unity in opposition to the non-Muslim world. And here we have an interesting phenomenon: I am tempted to say that it is the "others", the "communist" and "Christian" countries, that reinforce the unity of the Muslim world, playing, as it were, the role of a "compressor" to bring about its unification. Finally, and this is obviously the last stage, there was the discovery of Islam's oil resources and economic power, which hardly needs elaboration. Taken as a whole, this process follows a logical sequence: political independence, religious revival, and economic power. It has transformed the face of the world in less than half a century. And we are now witnessing a vast program to propagate Islam, involving the building of mosques everywhere, even in the USSR, the diffusion of Arab literature and culture, and the recovery of a history. Islam now boasts of having been the cradle of all civilizations at a time when Europe was sunk in barbarism and the Far East was torn asunder by divisions. Islam as the origin of all the sciences and arts is a theme that is constantly developed......
The Muslim world has not evolved in its manner of considering the non-Muslim, which is a reminder of the fate in store for those who may one day be submerged within it....."

http://www.dhimmi.org/Preface.html

Corin

July 31st, 2009 10:58am

Will you be passing this on to the new investigatory commission? I believe you but millions have been taught not to.

Suki

August 1st, 2009 11:01am

Mel, to pick you up on that last paragraph. I just despair that the British will ever get it.

Again and again, posters here have pointed out this government's de facto sponsorship of Islamic terror.

In part, this is because huge sums of money are going to people who - if they are not terrorists themselves or openly supportive of Islamic terror - seem to support the ideology that the terrorists wish to see enforced.

Today, we hear that MI5 may have recruited al Qaeda members.

If true, this is no surprise.

Our security services are - like every other government department - filled with Guardian-reading dweebs whose politcal correctness blinds them to reality.

The public recognises this too.

One only needs to scroll back in Coffee House to see posters' remarks about Jonathan Evans. He's a laughing stock, although to be fair to him, he probably has to follow the government's cravenness.

A propos your final paragraph, people want secret services that recognise what this threat is.

There's no point in running around looking for people if you don't understand that threat. Otherwise it may lead to fatal mistakes:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5949775/MI5-targeted-by-Islamic-extremists-in-rushed-recruitment-drive-after-July-2005-attacks-on-London.html

Neil Craig

August 3rd, 2009 1:36pm

Thus al Quaeda or the Iranians would never have worked with the USA by getting the USA to break mandatory UN sanctions by flying in terrorists & their guns to Bosnia to help our ex-Nazi allies there.

Such idealogical perfection is not found in arabs - nor in anybody else, but certainly, whatever Saddam's faults, the evidence shows he was not remotely as involved in working with al Quaeda as the US & NATO,

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Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here