Al Qaeda: The Database
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This article originally published by Global Research in 2005 sheds light on the nature of Al Qaeda, an intelligence construct used by Washington to destabilize and destroy sovereign countries, while sustaining the illusion of an outside enemy, which threatens the security of the Western World.
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Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence.
“I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was
attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French
officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and
cooperation with Jordan . . .
“Two of my Jordanian colleagues were
experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer
science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’
punishment.
“For example, when one of us was late at
the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell
us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant ‘You’ll be
logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘You will receive a warning
. . .’ If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about ‘Q
eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will
be punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al
Qaida.’
“In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for
Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the
Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a
new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication
requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than
necessary for their actual needs.
“It was decided to use a part of the
system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was
possible for the countries attending to access the database by
telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the
member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were
connected to that network.
“[According to a Pakistani major] the
database was divided into two parts, the information file where the
participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they
needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the
previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were
called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two
files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which
is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs
commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for
“base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat
‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the
base.”
“In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a
database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the
Islamic Conference’s secretariat.
“In the early 1990s, I was a military
intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action
Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot
of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services
. . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks
operating from the UK or from Belgium.
“These documents contained directions
sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages
quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the
tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to
the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations,
the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.
“Al Qaida remained the data base of the
Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference
are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups could pick up information
from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be
connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the
banking and business world.
“Because of the presence of ‘rogue
states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the
database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface
system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep
links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in
Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the
battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’
used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama
bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet
was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
Meet “Al Qaeda”
“Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group
nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property . . . The terrorist actions in
Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and
not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish
government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the
Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister
Erdogan for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician.
” . . . In the Third World the general
opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for
economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact ‘rogue
states,” specially the US and other NATO countries.
” Some Islamic economic lobbies are
conducting a war against the ‘liberal” economic lobbies. They use local
terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other
hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of
the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real
sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed
behind them.
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army
or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence
officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the
public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the
‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified
international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind
this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism
are only interested in making money.”
In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the
system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a
secret French military court of passing classified documents that
identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent
during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel’s case was transferred from a
civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel’s
character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system “got
him” for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been
behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of “Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.
French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about “Al Qaeda” — Another target of the neo-cons.
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