Whistleblower: Bin Laden was US proxy until 9/11

BY MURIEL KANE
Published: July 31, 2009

In an interview last month with blogger Brad Friedman, whistleblower Sibel Edmonds dropped a bombshell when a caller asked a question about 9/11.

The former FBI translator carefully replied, “I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.”

Australian blogger Luke Ryland has now filled in more details of the Central Asian operations to which Edmonds was referring, quoting Edmonds as saying on other occasions that al Qaeda and the Taliban were used by the US as proxies in “a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex.”

Turkey acted as the primary intermediary in this operation, with assistance from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The intention was, on one hand, to avoid creating a direct confrontation with China and Russia and, on the other, to prevent popular resistance to US influence by appealing to Central Asian aspirations for an Islamic and-Turkic resurgence.

Ryland also points out that Uighurs from the western Chinese province of Xinjiang were receiving training from al Qaeda in Afghanistan before 2001, with the expectation that they might serve as guerrilla forces in the event of US conflict with China. Edmonds has recently stated that “our fingerprint is all over” recent Uighur unrest within China.

There are certain factors, touched on lightly by Ryland in this article, which provide further support for Edmonds’ shocking allegations. One is what is sometimes known as the “Bernard Lewis Project,” an effort first espoused thirty years ago by Middle East scholar and Neocon guru Bernard Lewis to pursue “the fragmentation and balkanization of Iran along regional, ethnic and linguistic lines.”

Although this plan involves several different ethnic groups within Iran, including Arabs, Kurds, and Baluchis, its most ambitious component involves the use of pan-Turkic (or pan-Turanian) nationalism to shift power in the Middle East away from both Iran and the Arab states and towards Turkey, a US ally which is linguistically and ethnically close to the oil-rich states of Central Asia. Pan-Turanism often has fascist affinities, which makes its encouragement particularly problematic.

Another anomaly of US policy in the region has to do with the heroin trade. The US is known to have supported drug-trafficking Islamic terrorists in many countries of the region, including Chechnya, Kosovo, and Bosnia. It has also been allied with governments in Central Asia which has been strongly linked to the drug trade, such as Uzbekistan.

The extent of al Qaeda’s role in the Afghan heroin trade is a matter of dispute, but as Ryland suggests, there is no question that al Qaeda was supporting many of the same drug-trafficking groups as the US — a situation in sharp contrast with the usual assumption that the United States and al Qaeda were deadly enemies even prior to 9/11.

Edmonds latest remarks appear intended to draw fresh attention to these anomalies, as well as the role played by Enron and other Western oil companies and weapons suppliers in Central Asia in the 1990s.