CIA Roundup
at NVUSA
Oct. 21, 2001
By Greg Moses

From emails sent 10/21/2001,
PLEASE FORWARD

Part 1 of 2 (see part 2 below)
CIA Roundup at NVUSA--10/21/2001
Items 1-15

With Sunday's news that the "gloves are off" in the CIAs latest effort to get Osama bin Laden, here is a collection of clips and links related to the CIA at Nonviolence USA. This is part one of a two-part email.

The following materials (items 1-15) help support the claim that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, conceptual guru of Bush's "New War" theory and "Homeland Defense",["Homeland Security"] has extensive CIA background in Asian matters, and was perhaps instrumental in the transfer of opium tactics from Indo-China to Afghanistan very early on.

For those who consider oil motives relevant, it will be interesting to note that Armitage joined past and future National Security advisors to the Bush presidents in a July 2000 recommendation favoring a more aggressive US policy for Central Asian Oil. Current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had a ChevronTexaco tanker named in her honor while serving on the board of Chevron, a company with sizable interest in Caspian Sea oil. (See more oil refs on Page C.) One report mentions in passing that former National Security advisor Anthony Lake's appointment to head the CIA in the mid-90s was held up when it was disclosed that he had failed to divest his energy interests.

There is emerging literature surrounding the hypothesis that many of the US responses to Afghanistan have been planned for some time. Here we find an April 2001 report, alleging CIA involvement, in which the US reportedly pledged $350 million dollars to an effort to return Afghanistan's Shah to power.

In August, according to the NY Times, Minneapolis investigators were twice rebuffed by higher officials when they sought permission to further investigate the "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui.

The CIA is admitting that it has been working covertly with the Northern Alliance since the late 90s. And one report, citing Pakistani sources, says an old relationship between the CIA, Taliban, and Pakistani fundamentalists had been refreshed in the early months of the recent Bush administration.

For more clips and links on the CIA, please see message two that follows.

NOTE: Page assignments may change as new material is added.

From Page A:

(1) And, finally, you can expect us to act with honor - to be aggressive, but always in keeping with American laws and values.    --CIA Director George Tenet, Pearl Harbor Day Address, Town Hall Los Angeles (Vital Speeches 12/7/2000).

(2) "The gloves are off," one senior official said. "The president has given the agency the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway."    --Bob Woodward (Washington Post 10/21/2001).

(3) In past times of tragedy and fear, our government has harassed, investigated and arrested people solely because of their race, their religion, their national origin, their speech or their political beliefs. In the 1950's, when fears of the Soviet threat were used to convert dissent into disloyalty, people were spied upon and punished on the basis of political beliefs and associations instead of criminal evidence. Normal standards of criminal evidence were abandoned; instead, race and political beliefs became a cause for suspicion and recrimination. Intelligence-gathering activities were directed at Americans who dared to disagree with the government. We must not allow this to happen again.    --ACLU Action Alert (10/9/2001).

From Page B:

(4) Quoting unnamed sources, Mr. Asadollah Kuhzad, an Afghan journalist in Peshavar who covers the Afghan conflict for the Persian service of Radio France Internationale said America also supports the formation of a provisional government by Zahir Shah and plans to give aid of 350m dollars to this cause.

Former Afghan Prime minister Golbodin Hekmatyar [see RAWA commentary below], the leader of the Hezb Eslami, stating that the Afghan crisis could not be solved by outsiders and must be dealt among all warring parties, rejected both the meeting and the plan.

He said CIA was behind the project of forming an Afghan provisory government in exile.

Meanwhile, representatives from 42 different Afghan refugees organisations in Europe ended Monday their first gathering that was held in Holland to work out better co-ordination of their activities.    --Iranian Press Service (4/3/2001).

From Page C:

(5) Richard L. Armitage is president of Armitage Associates L.C. and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Office of International Security Affairs. Mr. Armitage, with the personal rank of ambassador, directed the formulation and implementation of U.S. assistance activities for the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. Mr. Armitage has extensive regional security experience in the former Soviet Union, East Asia and the Middle East. Since his departure from public service, Mr. Armitage has remained engaged in national security issues and is a member of the Defense Policy Board. Mr. Armitage is a graduate of the US Naval Academy.    --Bio of the man credited with inventing the term "Homeland Security" in his work on the National Defense Panel (Final Report 11/30/1997).

(6) It is generally believed that Mr.Armitage actually served in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) till 1978 and from 1976, after a cover resignation from the CIA, worked for some private companies of the CIA, which were being used by it for covert actions in Indo-China. His critics had alleged in the past that he was the author of the idea of using heroin to weaken the fighting capability of the communists in Indo-China and then in Afghanistan though the late Le Comte de Marenches, the head of the French External Intelligence Agency under Presidents George Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing, had claimed that it was he who had given this idea to the Americans with specific reference to Afghanistan.    --B. Raman (South Asia Analysis Group 1.3.2001).

(7) A prudent US response to this danger would give greater emphasis to energy efficiency and to research on alternative technologies for supplying energy requirements. Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, oil will remain an essential commodity. Greater attention must therefore be given to increasing supplies of oil in ways that diversify supplies from areas other than the Persian Gulf. The most promising new source of world supplies is the Caspian region, which appears to contain the largest petroleum reserves discovered since the North Sea. This geopolitical crossroad, which includes Iran, Russia, and a number of newly-independent states struggling with post-Soviet modernization and dangers of Islamic extremism, demands more attention by American policymakers.    --Armitage, etal. (Commission on America's National Interests July, 2000 ).

(8) The Commission was jointly chaired by Mr.Robert Ellsworth of the Hamilton Technology Ventures, L.P., Mr.Andrew Goodpaster of the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute and Ms.Rita Hauser of the Hauser Foundation and included, amongst its members, Mr.Armitage, Ms.Condoleezza Rice, Mr.Bush's National Security Adviser, and Mr.Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser under Mr.George Bush (Sr), whom Ms.Rice once described as amongst her mentors. Though this Commission was not set up by the Republican Party, considering the active role played in it by these three prominent personalities as well as many others close to the Republican Party, its report needs close study by our policy-makers and analysts.    --B. Raman (South Asia Analysis Group 1.3.2001).

(9) Chevron christened the Condoleezza Rice, a 136,000 deadweight-ton, double-hulled ship, early on in Rice’s decade-long stint on the oil giant’s board of directors. Rice, a member of Chevron’s board of directors since 1991, explained on television’s Fox News Sunday in August that Chevron had a policy of naming tankers after its directors. "There’s also a George Shultz and a David Packard," she remarked.

By advising the president to take military, political or economic action, the national security adviser can influence decisions that can disrupt or facilitate the operations of global multinationals like Chevron. Under the Clinton administration, the White House counsel’s office advised members of the NSC to divest themselves of energy-related stocks. When then National Security Adviser Anthony Lake was tapped to become the CIA director in the mid-1990s, his failure to divest $300,000 in energy stocks became the subject of a Justice Department investigation.    --The Public I (Center for Public Integrity: March 7, 2001).

Page E:

(10) On Friday, the House of Representatives backed away from an immediate inquiry into what went wrong. Instead the House legislation calls for a commission that will be more forward-looking, identifying reforms needed to help prevent future attacks....

At about the same time that the C.I.A.'s August report was being prepared and delivered, the F.B.I. arrested a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, on immigration charges. Officials at a flight school in Minnesota had called authorities after they became troubled that Mr. Moussaoui was trying to learn how to fly large jet aircraft, but had said he did not need to know how to take off or land....

[Senior officials at F.B.I. headquarters rejected requests from agents in Minneapolis for a wider investigation on two occasions, even after a French intelligence agency warned the bureau in a classified two-page cable on Aug. 27 that Mr. Moussaoui had "Islamic extremist beliefs."...]*

Another example came in late August, just as the F.B.I. was debating whether to investigate Mr. Moussaoui. The C.I.A. told the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it should place two men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, on its watch list to bar entry into the United States. The C.I.A. had earlier determined that Mr. Almihdhar had attended a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 with people later implicated in the bombing of the Cole. Mr. Alhazmi had later traveled with Mr. Almihdhar to the United States, and so the C.I.A. wanted him added to the watch list too....    --(NYTimes 10/6/2001 including a special report by David Johnston and Philip Shenon).

(11) Specifically, the compromise bill -- the "Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (PATRIOT)" (H.R. 2975)-- contains troubling provisions that would permit indefinite detention of a non-citizen ordered deported to a country that would not accept him or her, minimize judicial supervision of electronic surveillance by law enforcement authorities and allow intelligence agencies to spy on U.S. citizens by providing them enhanced access to sensitive information about them.    --ACLU (10/3/2001)

Page F:

(12) A seasoned Republican military strategist said: "Afghanistan is obviously the initial target, but it isn't easy to decide exactly what to do. There is always the danger of going off half-cocked. It's crucial that we make the first attack an effective one, and I suspect that we don't have enough reliable intelligence yet to make key decisions."    --(NYTimes 9/27/2001).

Page G:

(13) It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.    -- Seumas Milne (Guardian 9/13/2001)

Page H:

(14) The covert effort, which has not been previously disclosed, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti- Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan, and to have his forces go after Mr. bin Laden. Mr. Massoud was himself killed, C.I.A. officials say, only two days before the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, and the C.I.A. believes he was assassinated by members of Mr. bin Laden's organization.    --(NYTimes 9/29/2001).

(15) Those who have followed the warming of relations between the Bush administration and Kabul are asking why the Bush administration wasn't alerted to an impending attack through Taliban back-channels. According to sources close to the Taliban and Pakistan's Jamiaat-i-Islami Party--the Pakistani fundamentalist movement that nurtured and trained the Taliban--a senior Jamiaat official, Qazi Husein Ahmad, recently traveled to both London and Washington. While in Washington, he reportedly re-established ties with the Taliban's old CIA contacts from the Reagan and first Bush administrations.    -- Wayne Madsen (In These Times 10/15/2001).

Part 2
CIA Roundup at NVUSA--10/21/2001
Intro & Items 16-31


This is the second of two emails exploring the context for President Bush's order last month to "take the gloves off" of the CIAs pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

The following materials (items 16-31) support the claim that the Bush family has enjoyed a special relationship to the CIA for nearly forty years, with current director George Tenet enjoying a specially warm relationship with the Bushes.

CIA critics say the agency already operates, "by whatever means necessary," including the use of illicit drug profits, and coordination with local drug cartels, for which Afghanistan counts as an especially lucrative source.

The Bush administration awarded the Taliban $43 million earlier this year for its cooperation in suppressing opium growing, a move which reportedly shifted poppy power to the north, where CIA involvement with the Northern Alliance had been underway for some years.

It is interesting to note in passing that there are lingering concerns over the US prosecution of the Gulf War, including allegations that US forces "massacred" about 150,000 retreating Iraqi soldiers following their formal retreat.

As is already well known to wartime internet junkies, the famed training camps in Afghanistan were built with US tax dollars under covert CIA supervision through the auspices of Pakistan's secret service, ISI. But ABC also reports that some of Afghanistan's fundamentalist forces were treated to training in Virginia.

Someday we'll need a total figure for US money that can be attributed to the bin Laden budget. Meanwhile, I'm guessing at least $10 billion--not counting any poppy pennies that may have been diverted to "national security".

Finally, the ACLU worries that national intelligence has traditionally turned on its own citizens during times of crisis and fear. This makes the US system complex, argue Paul Wolff and friends, because the struggle for democracy at home has sometimes been a costly cause.

NOTE: Page assignments may change as new material is added.

Page H (Cont.):

(16) Oversimplified, the CIA's primary global foreign policy method is to gain influence and control by whatever means necessary. To be a bit more clear, let's compare civilian police against covert operatives. In police work, law enforcement dealings with underworld elements are always difficult and wraught with ethical problems, but civilian police are subject to rules and oversight. Conversely, the CIA is comparatively unencumbered by the rules that govern civilian police corps, and suffers little Congressional oversight. The result of this extreme freedom in executing policy, is that the CIA's official and unofficial operatives involved in its covert operations division are free to pursue military objectives with whatever means they see fit.

These operatives are covert warriors, they are key in expanding the US sphere of influence. In order for covert actions to be effective politically and militarily, the CIA employs parts of the underworld as its operatives (like the thousand foreign agents mentioned above). After all, who knows the political and social terrain better than the local mob? But, once employed by the CIA, these criminal enterprises naturally expect some kind of quid-pro-quo, and in order to concentrate power via its foriegn underworld proxies, the CIA has to find ways to reward and empower its criminal proxies. If the CIA really wants to gain influence and control in countries and economies via alliances with underground criminal enterprises, and if these alliances entail protecting drug piplines, well, the end justifies the means.    --CIA & Drugs: An Introduction (ciadrugs.homestead.com). Also: Bibliography of Covert Operations in Afghanistan 1992-1996.

(17) Mr. President, we hope that you and Mrs. Bush will always come home to visit us at CIA. We consider it an honor to have our complex named after you, and we will do all that we can to make you and our wonderful country proud of us....

The unbiased assessment of our Directorate of Intelligence is that throughout your long years of public service you have been among their most dedicated, enthusiastic and discriminating customers. You have always understood how vitally important it is for our national leaders to be able to make their decisions based on the most complete information and the best analysis possible. As DCI, as Vice President and as President you read every single Daily Brief that the Intelligence Directorate produced. Even if they doubted that anybody else in the government was reading their stuff, they could always count on you! As you know, our analysts pride themselves on the accuracy of their predictions. They will always be among your biggest fans, even though, Mr. President, you didn’t always call it right. And we found one such instance. After President Ford asked you to take the CIA job, and you answered the call of duty, you wrote the following to your good friend, Congressman Bill Steiger: “I honestly feel my political future is behind me – but hell, I’m 51, and this new one gives me a chance to really contribute.”    --Georg Tenet to Bush Sr. upon the dedication of the Bush CIA Building (CIA Website 4/26/1999).

(18) Tenet is the first CIA director in 28 years to remain in office after the White House switched occupants.    --Dept. of State (1/16/2001).

(19) Explosive growth in Afghan opium production is being driven by the shared interests of traditional traffickers and the Taliban. And as with so many of these cross-national issues, Mr. Chairman, what concerns me most is the way the threats become intertwined. In this case, there is ample evidence that Islamic extremists such as Usama Bin Ladin use profits from the drug trade to support their terror campaign.    --George Tenet (2/2/2000).

(20) [Afghanistan]: world's largest illicit opium producer, surpassing Burma (potential production in 1999 - 1,670 metric tons; cultivation in 1999 - 51,500 hectares, a 23% increase over 1998); a major source of hashish; increasing number of heroin-processing laboratories being set up in the country; major political factions in the country profit from drug trade    --CIA Factbook ( Afghanistan).

(21) It is only fitting that on December 7th, I quote Harry Truman - the President who created the CIA as a hedge against a new Pearl Harbor. Truman once said: "We must help people improve the conditions of life, to create a world in which democracy and freedom can flourish."    --George Tenet (Vital Speeches 12/7/2000).

(22) Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage since the tragic events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. That, in effect, made the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial benefactor according to syndicated columnist Robert Scheer writing in The Los Angeles times on May 22. But -- as we described in FTW's March 2001 issue -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift?    --Michael C. Ruppert ( copvcia.org 9/18/2001).

(23) "Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic," said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the U.S. and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history....

The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat. The point of contention involves the Bush administration's claim that the Iraqi troops were retreating to regroup and fight again. Such a claim is the only way that the massacre which occurred could be considered legal under international law. But in fact the claim is false and obviously so. The troops were withdrawing and removing themselves from combat under direct orders from Baghdad that the war was over and that Iraq had quit and would fully comply with UN resolutions. To attack the soldiers returning home under these circumstances is a war crime.    --Joyce Chediac (5/11/1991).

Page I:

(24) But the United States is a very complex system. It's very hard to describe because, yes, there are elements of democracy; there are things that you're grateful for, that you're not in front of the death squads in El Salvador. On the other hand, it's not quite a democracy. And one of the things that makes it not quite a democracy is the existence of outfits like the FBI and the CIA. Democracy is based on openness, and the existence of a secret policy, secret lists of dissident citizens, violates the spirit of democracy.    --Paul Wolff, etal. (COINTELPRO 9/1/2001).

(25) Contrary to the claims of US officials, these were not sophisticated training facilities, but improvised structures to put up the trainees. The only sophisticated parts of these camps were the ammunition storage depots, which were being used during the Afghan war of the 1980s for storing the arms and ammunition given by the CIA before their distribution to the Mujahideen by the ISI. Since CIA officials used to visit these camps, set up with their assistance, during the 1980s, they were well aware of their location and of the location of the ammunition storage depots. It was, therefore , surprising that the American bombings of August 20,1998, failed to hit any of the storage depots. They destroyed only the improvised residential portions. This doesn’t speak well of the much-vaunted Cruise missiles (Tomahawks).    --SAPRA India (1998). Also posted at americanfriends.org

Page J:

(26) At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback.    --Michael Moran ( MSNBC). See also bibliography on covert action in Afghanistan.

(27) Thirdly, Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin. The ISI had encouraged this since 1982, and by now all the other players had their reasons for supporting the idea.    --Ahmed Rashid (Center for Public Integrity, CPI 9/13/2001).

(28) In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.    --Michel Chossudovsky (Centre for Research on Globalisation, CRG 9/12/2001).

(29) In Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press: 1999), ABC journalist John Cooley documents how radical Afghan militants were trained in Virginia to fight the Soviet Union, using US tax dollars in the 1980s. According to Cooley, these militants were trained at Camp Peary - CIA facility in Virginia. The Federation of American Scientists has published unclassified documents that explain Peary's role: to provide "advanced weapons and explosives training"    --Peace Poster. Also see book review, borrowed from LATimes 1/16/2000.

(30) But unfortunately we must say that it was the government of the United States who supported Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia-ul Haq in creating thousands of religious schools from which the germs of Taliban emerged. In the similar way, as is clear to all, Osama Bin Laden has been the blue-eyed boy of CIA. But what is more painful is that American politicians have not drawn a lesson from their pro-fundamentalist policies in our country and are still supporting this or that fundamentalist band or leader. In our opinion any kind of support to the fundamentalist Taliban and Jehadies is actually trampling democratic, women's rights and human rights values.    --Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan: RAWA (9/14/2001 ). See also a hefty collection of materials about US foreign policy at thirdworldtraveler.com

(31) Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.    --Bill Blum's translation (Le Nouvel Observateur, Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76, French Edition). Submitted via email.

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