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Friday, September 30, 2005 Page A18 Special to The Globe and Mail
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MP
Michael Meacher Says
(1) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050930/IRAQ30/TPInternational/TopStories
James Palmer, BAGHDAD “A chain of powerful explosions set off within moments of one another brought chaos to a town north of Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 60 people and wounding 70 others. The bombings are likely the beginning of a campaign of terrorism expected throughout Iraq. They come two weeks after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who leads al-Qaeda in the country, declared war on all Iraqi Shiites, and one day after U.S. President George W. Bush warned that violence would escalate in the lead-up to the Oct. 15 referendum on the proposed Iraqi constitution.” "We can expect they'll do everything in their power to try to stop the march of freedom," Mr. Bush said Wednesday. "And our troops are ready for it." Also yesterday, Iraqis said U.S. troops raided the homes of two Sunni leaders, angering sect members and reinforcing their feeling of alienation from the political process.
The bombings were a morbid foreshadowing of the destructive scenes people dread during the next 15 days. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda strike. Two of the bombs were packed in pickup trucks parked along a main thoroughfare in the centre of Balad, a predominately Shia town 80 kilometres north of the Iraqi capital with a major U.S. airbase on its outskirts. The explosions went off shortly before sunset, hitting a bank and a vegetable market where people were shopping for their evening meal. Eyewitnesses said the first bomb went off at about 6:45 p.m. local time, and the second followed 10 minutes later, Associated Press reported. A third bomb exploded on a different street. Most of the casualties were civilians, although the police chief and four officers were among the 70 wounded, Khaled al-Azawi of Balad Hospital told AP. Noting there were body parts at the scene not yet accounted for, he suggested the toll could reach 75 dead and 100 wounded. Next month's referendum on the constitution is expected to intensify divisions between Iraq's Shia majority and the minority Sunnis, who dominated Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime. More than 140 people have died in the past four days and the toll is expected to rise as the referendum approaches. Sunnis make up only 20 per cent of the population, but they could defeat the constitution because of a loophole in voting rules: If two-thirds of voters in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces vote no, the referendum fails, even if an overall majority approves. There are four provinces where Sunnis could potentially cross that margin. As the violence grows, the fear is that the results of the referendum may unleash a civil war that could split the country. The International Crisis Group, an independent Belgium-based organization seeking to resolve global conflicts, recently said a compromise among Iraq's religious groups must be reached before the referendum. "Unless the flaws of its draft constitution can be corrected in the next few weeks before the Iraqi people vote on it, Iraq is likely to slide toward full-scale civil war and the breakup of the country," the ICG said. Elsewhere, a U.S. military spokesman said a roadside explosion killed five marines yesterday during combat operations in the western town of Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold used to stage attacks against American forces. The deaths bring the total of U.S. troops killed in Iraq over the past four days to 13. The incident in Ramadi was the deadliest for U.S. forces since a roadside bomb killed 14 marines on the outskirts of Haditha in western Iraq in August. Nearly 2,000 American troops have died since the U.S.-led invasion in March of 2003. Gunman also killed 11 Iraqis, including four policemen, in at least three drive-by shootings yesterday throughout Baghdad, and a 12-year-old boy was killed in a mortar blast. Another four Iraqis were killed in attacks outside of the capital. **
MP Michael Meacher
Says
An astonishing claim that M16 recruited Muslim extremists in Britain for terror training abroad has been made by Oldham MP and former cabinet minister Michael Meacher.
Mr Meacher also suggest that a British Muslim held under sentenced of death in Pakistan for beheading a US journalist is being kept alive because he was a British double agent.
The Oldham West and Royton MP makes these sensational claims in an article for Asian News' sister paper, The Guardian.
The former Environment Secretary claims that Britain's 'overseas' security organisation, M16, set about recruiting UK Muslims directing them to support US efforts to overthrow communist governments in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He highlights a Delhi-based research foundation that estimates anything up to 200 UK Muslims could have undergone training in overseas terrorist camps under the protection of the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, who were backing the armed Islamic insurrection against the Afghan communist regime and its Soviet backers.
He writes: "During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that the British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group..to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo."
The now disbanded al-Muhajiroun group held meetings in Manchester after 9/11 praising the courage of the suicide bombers and claimed to be helping UK Muslims to fight US troops in Afghanistan.
Mr Meacher also highlights the case of UK-born Muslim Omar Saeed Sheikh, sentenced to death for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
Mr Meacher writes that Sheikh has been allowed 32 appeals against his sentence, the last being adjourned "indefinitely". He says the same Delhi foundation describes Sheikh as a British agent.
Mr Meacher adds: "This is all the more remarkable when 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, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lomel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit."
Mr Meacher's argument is that the UK and US security service do not want a proper investigation into these links because it would expose how they encouraged and helped to recruit Islamic 'warriors' when it suited their purposes but that these same forces eventually turned on the west, inflamed by what they saw as anti-Islamic occupations and pro-Israeli international policies.
Read the full Guardian article below -
Oldham MP Michael Meacher argues Britain's security services helped to create Islamic warriors who eventually bit back against the west
The videotape of the suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan has switched the focus of the London bombings away from the establishment view of brainwashed, murderous individuals and highlighted a starker political reality. While there can be no justification for horrific killings of this kind, they need to be understood against the ferment of the last decade radicalising Muslim youth of Pakistani origin living in Europe.
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US funded large numbers of jihadists through Pakistan's secret intelligence service, the ISI. Later the US wanted to raise another jihadi corps, again using proxies, to help Bosnian Muslims fight to weaken the Serb government's hold on Yugoslavia. Those they turned to included Pakistanis in Britain.
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. The insurgents were also allowed to move further east to Kosovo. By the end of the fighting in Bosnia there were tens of thousands of Islamist insurgents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo; many then moved west to Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
Less well known is evidence of the British government's relationship with a wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo.
Since July Scotland Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings.
According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia, but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6.
One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh. He is now in jail in Pakistan under sentence of death for the killing of the US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 - although many (including Pearl's widow and the US authorities) doubt that he committed the murder. However, reports from Pakistan suggest that Sheikh continues to be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain.
Sheikh was recruited as a student by Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which operates a network in Britain. It has actively recruited Britons from universities and colleges since the early 1990s, and has boasted of its numerous British Muslim volunteers. Investigations in Pakistan have suggested that on his visits there Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London suicide bombers, contacted members of two outlawed local groups and trained at two camps in Karachi and near Lahore.
Indeed the network of groups now being uncovered in Pakistan may point to senior al-Qaida operatives having played a part in selecting members of the bombers' cell. 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".
Why then is Omar Sheikh not being dealt with when he is already under sentence of death? Astonishingly his appeal to a higher court against the sentence was adjourned in July for the 32nd time and has since been adjourned indefinitely. This is all the more remarkable when 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, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit.
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 with the comment: "To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" - a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness.
All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west, including Britain. The extraordinary US forbearance towards Omar Sheikh, its restraint towards the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Dr AQ Khan, selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the huge US military assistance to Pakistan and the US decision last year to designate Pakistan as a major non-Nato ally in south Asia all betoken a deeper strategic set of goals as the real priority in its relationship with Pakistan. These might be surmised as Pakistan providing sizeable military contingents for Iraq to replace US troops, or Pakistani troops replacing Nato forces in Afghanistan. Or it could involve the use of Pakistani military bases for US intervention in Iran, or strengthening Pakistan as a base in relation to India and China.
Whether the hunt for those behind the London bombers can prevail against these powerful political forces remains to be seen. Indeed it may depend on whether Scotland Yard, in its attempts to uncover the truth, can prevail over MI6, which is trying to cover its tracks and in practice has every opportunity to operate beyond the law under the cover of national security.
First published by the Asian News
© Copyright 2005 Guardian Media Group
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