by F. William Engdahl
August 11, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
Since the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting
of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wiki-Leaks has gained global notoriety and
credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the
public from whistleblowers within various governments.
Their latest “coup”
involved
alleged leak of thousands of pages of supposedly sensitive
documents regarding US informers within the Taliban in Afghanistan and their
ties to senior people linked to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence.
The
evidence suggests however that far from an honest leak, it is a calculated
disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian
intelligence and a cover-up of the US and Western role in drug trafficking
out of Afghanistan.
Since the posting of the Afghan documents some days ago
the Obama White
House has given the leaks credibility by claiming further leaks pose a
threat to US national security. Yet details of the papers reveals little
that is sensitive. The one figure most prominently mentioned, General
(Retired) Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani military intelligence
agency, ISI, is the man who during the 1980’s coordinated the CIA-financed
Mujahideen guerilla war in Afghanistan against the Soviet regime there.
In
the latest Wikileaks documents, Gul is accused of regularly meeting Al Qaeda
and Taliban leading people and orchestrating suicide attacks on NATO forces
in Afghanistan.
The leaked documents also claim that
Osama bin Laden, who was reported dead
three years ago by the late Pakistan candidate Benazir Bhutto on BBC, was
still alive, conveniently keeping the myth alive for the Obama
Administration
War on Terror at a point when most Americans had forgotten
the original reason the
Bush Administration allegedly invaded Afghanistan to
pursue the Saudi Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.
Demonizing Pakistan?
The naming of Gul today as a key liaison to the Afghan “Taliban” forms part
of a larger pattern of US and British recent efforts to demonize the current
Pakistan regime as a key part of the problems in Afghanistan.
Such a demonization greatly boosts the position of recent US military ally, India.
Furthermore, Pakistan is the only muslim country possessing atomic weapons.
The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency
reportedly would very much like to change that.
A phony campaign against
the politically outspoken Gul via Wikileaks could be part of that
geopolitical effort.
The London Financial Times says Gul’s name appears in about 10 of roughly
180 classified US files that allege Pakistan’s intelligence service
supported Afghan militants fighting NATO forces. Gul told the newspaper the
US has lost the war in Afghanistan, and that the leak of the documents would
help the Obama administration deflect blame by suggesting that Pakistan was
responsible.
Gul told the paper,
“I am a very favorite whipping boy of
America. They can’t imagine the Afghans can win wars on their own. It would
be an abiding shame that a 74-year-old general living a retired life
manipulating the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan results in the defeat of
America.”
Notable, in light of the latest Afghan Wikileaks documents, is the spotlight
on the 74-year-old Gul.
As I wrote in a previous piece, Warum Afghanistan?
Teil VI:Washingtons Kriegsstrategie in Zentralasien, published this June on
this website, Gul has been outspoken about the role of the US military in
smuggling Afghan heroin out of the country via the top-security Manas Air
Base in Kyrgyzstan.
As well, in a UPI interview on September 26, 2001, two weeks after the 9-11
attacks, Gul stated, in reply to the question who did Black Sept. 11?,
“Mossad and its accomplices. The US spends $40 billion a year on its 11
intelligence agencies. That’s $400 billion in 10 years. Yet the Bush
Administration says it was taken by surprise. I don’t believe it.
Within 10
minutes of the second twin tower being hit in the World Trade Center CNN
said Osama bin Laden had done it. That was a planned piece of disinformation
by the real perpetrators…” [1]
Gul is clearly not well liked in Washington.
He claims his request for travel visas to the UK and to the USA have
repeatedly been denied.
Making Gul into the arch enemy would suit some in
Washington nicely.
Who is Julian Assange?
Wikileaks founder and “Editor-in-chief”,
Julian Assange, is a mysterious
39-year-old Australian about whom little is known. He has suddenly become a
prominent public figure offering to mediate with the White House over the
leaks.
Following the latest leaks, Assange told Der Spiegel, one of three
outlets with which he shared material from the most recent leak, that the
documents he had unearthed would,
“change our perspective on not only the war
in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.”
Yet a closer examination of the public position of Assange on one of the
most controversial issues of recent decades, the forces behind the
September
11, 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center shows him to be
curiously establishment.
When the Belfast Telegraph interviewed him on July
19, he stated,
"Any time people with power plan in secret, they are conducting a
conspiracy. So there are conspiracies everywhere. There are also crazed
conspiracy theories. It's important not to confuse these two..."
What about
9/11?: "I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false
conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real
conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."
What about the
Bilderberg
Conference?: "That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a networking sense. We have
published their meeting notes." [2]
That statement from a person who has built a reputation of being
anti-establishment is more than notable.
First, as thousands of physicists,
engineers, military professionals and airline pilots have testified, the
idea that 19 barely-trained Arabs armed with box-cutters could divert four
US commercial jets and execute the near-impossible strikes on the Twin
Towers and Pentagon over a time period of 93 minutes with not one Air Force NORAD military interception, is beyond belief.
Precisely who executed the
professional attack is a matter for genuine unbiased international inquiry.
Notable for Mr Assange’s blunt denial of any sinister 9/11 conspiracy is the
statement in a BBC interview by former US Senator, Bob Graham, who chaired
the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when it performed
its Joint Inquiry into 9/11.
Graham told BBC,
"I can just state that within
9/11 there are too many secrets, that is information that has not been made
available to the public for which there are specific tangible credible
answers and that the withholding of those secrets has eroded public
confidence in their government as it relates to their own security."
BBC
narrator: "Senator Graham found that the cover-up led to the heart of the
administration."
Bob Graham: "I called the White House and talked with Ms.
Rice and said, ‘Look, we've been told we're going to get cooperation in this
inquiry, and she said she'd look into it, and nothing happened.’”
Of course, the Bush Administration was able to use the 9/11 attacks to
launch its War on Terrorism in Afghanistan and then Iraq, a point Assange
conveniently omits.
For his part, General Gul claims that US intelligence orchestrated the
Wikileaks on Afghanistan to find a scapegoat, Gul, to blame.
Conveniently,
as if on cue, British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, on a state
visit to India, lashed out at the alleged role of Pakistan in supporting
Taliban in Afghanistan, conveniently lending further credibility to the Wikileaks story.
The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told...
Notes
[1] General Hamid Gul, Arnaud de Borchgrave 2001 Interview with Hamid Gul,
Former ISI Chief, UPI, reprinted July 2010 on http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/28/arnaud-de-borchgrave-2001-interview-with-hamid-gul-former-isi-chief/
[2] Julian Assange, Interview in Belfast Telegraph, July 19, 2010.