Aquarian Weekly 10/3/01
REALITY CHECK

9/11/01 PART III
THE FOLLY OF NEGOTIATING WITH MANIACS
A Qualified Study of Middle Eastern Traditions

"What troubles me the most about the United States current standing in the Middle East in regards to Arab countries is the delicate balance between our alliance with Israel set against the tenuous financial dealings with OPEC. And right now no one knows how the fallout of the Gulf War will effect those invisible, radical factions who fall through the cracks of that balance." - Henry Kissenger May, 1997

The above quote is merely a paraphrase, scribbled hurriedly on complimentary Best Western paper sometime in the early hours of a rainy morning in downtown Boston.

I had taken the trip up to Beantown with the band, DogVoices to promote my first book and drink for free. I didn't expect to find anything worth watching at near dawn, sipping tepid beer and chomping soggy French fries, unable to sleep.

Henry Kissenger was suddenly flickering on the television, blathering on about fractured foreign relations with what was left of Russia and the "Chinese problem" when he turned to the Middle East.

Kissenger knew a thing or two about the Middle East, after years of a failed "shuttle diplomacy" between Arab leaders and the Israeli government as Secretary of State for the Nixon Administration.

The region was of special interest to me, for I'd visited Israel the previous year, spending several hours in the company of the Israeli Defense Force.

By the mid-90s' the IDF was the finest fighting machine on the planet, and extremely sensitive to terrorist attacks on a daily basis. I'd encountered teams of two deployed at every buss stop, train station, supermarket and museum. I found their stories intriguing, sad and inspiring.

Their faces were fresh in my mind as Kissenger continued with a hint of concern in his voice rarely heard by anyone in the media. It was well known among the reporting set that Kissenger normally horded his true feelings for dignitaries, diplomats or presidents, but now here he was almost whimpering like a school boy on CSPAN to some wetback college students about the flippant way in which the United States juggled the Arab states after the Gulf War.

By 1997, Kissenger was still "connected". Outside of South East Asia, where he is still considered Genghis Kahn with a perm, Kissenger was often called to advise many smaller nations in the pursuit of some kind of government.

I wrote down many of his key thoughts that night regarding Israel, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and, most notably, Afghanistan, including alarming buzz terms that he never used in public like "fear" and "trepidation."

Kissenger was sure that the U.S.'s failure to secure Syrian, Israeli and Lebananese relations, hanging by the thread of ignored treaties, and a slowly crumbling coalition of Arab states, promised protection by the Bush administration against Iraqi retaliation, spelled rancor and doom in the coming years.

Kissenger also blurted out several names of which he cited as "dissidents" roaming around Saudi Arabia, funded with oil and drug money, with a "severe disdain for all things American or European due to the colonization of Arab states following the fall of the Ottoman Empire after WWI."

That was the first time I'd heard the name, Osama bin Laden, which rang a bell less than two years later when the first of two U.S. embassies located in Africa went up in flames.

Bin Laden had just taken control of a terrorist network called Al-Qaeda, which was a rogue fighting force mutated from the Mujahedeen, a defense militia ironically bankrolled by the Reagan Administration during the Afghani war with the Soviets in the 1980s'.

The former Saudi native later became infamous in varied FBI reports for opium trafficking and weapons' theft in Lebanon during the dark mess known as "Desert Storm".

Kissenger mentioned two other names that came to my attention last week when a source recently e-mailed me an article from the radically popular, Jane's Intelligence Digest, which fingers both men as "leading suspects in the attack on New York and Washington with strong ties to Iraq."

The first is Ayman Al Zawahiri, a Lebanese freedom fighter and current senior member of the Al-Queda. The other is Egyptian born, Imad Mughniyeh, considered, according to Jane's, "the world's foremost terrorist masterminds."

Things became ever clearer this week, when a close acquaintance of the Reality Check News & Information Desk in Jerusalem hinted that Mughniyeh's connection to the Iraqi government is "paramount to the origin of any attack on your mainland."

Twice during our exchange, he went to great lengths to express that while bin Laden has the money and the influence to enact the level of attack perpetrated on 9/11/01, "he neither has the fear of his enemies nor the faith of his allies to mastermind something as complex and devastating."

Columnist Jamie Dettmer, writing in Business A.M. on 9/24 quoted his own Israeli source's portrait of bin Laden as "overrated" and "a school boy next to those maniacs."

Further intelligence reports indicate that Al Zawahiri's campaign for the Lebanonese liberation of land on the West Bank, originally seized by the IDF backed by U.S weaponry, and Mughniyeh's revenge for family members allegedly murdered by U.S. soldiers during America's occupation of Kuwait following the Gulf War, has motivated thousands of radical Muslim factions to action, including the infamous Taliban.

Prior to Mughniyeh machinations, the Taliban had been nothing more than a drug cartel running heroin to Russia through Asian organized crime syndicates. According to our Israeli source, "The idea that the Taliban is harboring bin Laden is missing a key point; it is bin Laden who owns the Taliban, and they have little choice but to back him or face annihilation."

Both Al Zawahiri and Mughniyeh have had multi-million dollar marks on their heads from several governments, including the U.S., for some time, and were fingered by the Israeli government four weeks before the disastrous events at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as "possible partners in a massive attack on U.S. soil."

But what does Kissenger's dawn revelations and the outing of these militant mutants reveal?

For all intents and purposes, the reasons for the events of 9/11/01 are simple: The continued failure of the U.S. government to allow Israel to defend itself against Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon with sanctimonious pleas for restraint and pompous political photo-op peace treaties that amount to nothing but buying time for terrorist havens like the PLO to stockpile weapons and take the lives of innocents, and, sadly, the two prior administration's glaring inability to root Saddam Hussein out of Iraq.

The president's denouncing of the IDF actions last month against a Palestinian federal building, after the latest of now 80 gutless attacks by Hammas this year alone, is an example of this.

Yasser Arafat's secret army is run in conjunction with Mughniyeh's notorious Hizbullah, a significant Arab threat to Israel, and a far more likely source for the attacks on the U.S. Their beef with the U.S. resides in nearly four billion dollars of military aid sent to Israel annually.

But America's alliance with Israel is only a small part of the puzzle.

In the end, it was George Bush Sr's "oil police action" ten years ago that failed to eradicate Hussein by acquiescing to an "Arab Coalition" that today harbors and sponsors scores of terrorist organizations worldwide.

"Do not think for one minute that Bush Jr. being the president is a coincidence when it comes to these crimes," my Jerusalem source concluded.

Meanwhile, dozens of nations, and their ever-changing governments, have been doing business with the U.S., feeding off American financial and military aid, bloated on crude oil money and American business concerns to ostensibly destroy its citizens.

All the while we send in UN special consultants to Iraq to check on weapons pile up and occasionally bomb military instillations, followed by patriotic rhetoric and flag-waving propaganda.

The U.S. government, the CIA, the FBI, even an aging diplomat croaking out top secret info on CSPAN at four in the morning, knew about these people, but even now we don't hear anyone in the mainstream media utter their names or their obvious connections to these attacks.

After years of trading secrets, weapons and laundered cash, "we the people" were sitting ducks, and the events of 9/11/01, symptoms of a much greater disease.

I remember one more thing about that rainy morning in Boston.

I folded up that paper, put it into my duffel bag, and fell asleep to Kissenger's monotone ramblings, and hadn't fully awakened until now.

Next Week: Part IV - Kasbah Rocking or Cooking The Great American Ass Whup

Part I - 9/11/01

Part II - Enemies of Reason or The God Bullshit Must Cease

Part III - The Folly of Negotiating with Maniacs

Reality Check | Pop Culture | Politics | Sports | Music