Saturday, September 10, 2005

 

London bombings may have been done by jihadis trained by US for Yugoslav war; 9/11 link?

Call it a bit of blowback from Clinton's war, if you like. Or, more accurately, from the attempted Republican coup against Clinton. MP Michael Meacher suggests in an opinion piece to The Guardian that: According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies". As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organisations, including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia - an episode that calls into question the credibility of the subsequent "war on terror". For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilise the former Yugoslavia. In fact, he doesn't suggest it, he says it. This much is old news. I mentioned this four years ago, and pointed out that this was a consequence of the GOP hobbling Clinton. If he wanted to act in the Balkans (and the failure of the American government to act until after the mass deaths in Bosnia and the Croatian sector was a profound embarrassment to all of Europe and to America), he could only use covert aid to the Mujahedeen. But Meacher points to a wider involvement by Britain, and says, "The Observer Research Foundation has argued that there are even "grounds to suspect that the [London] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his jail in Pakistan"....this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker...Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan ... The clear implication that Meacher is driving at is that the US Government would be highly inconvenienced if its own links to 9/11 were exposed by too vigorous a questioning of Omar Sheikh. I'd like to see government officials suffer no less inconvenience than the families of those who died.
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