“This isn’t a question of hearts and minds,” State Department spokesman Adam Ereli assuredly declared. “It’s a question of bodies and gore. This is a network, a confederacy of evil that will stop at nothing to advance its radical agenda.” Ereli “said that [the agenda allegedly revealed in the letter] has as its objective is an Islamic empire, starting in Iraq and expanding to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, practicing the abuses and intolerance that the Taliban demonstrated in Afghanistan.”

Ah, the Taliban.

“The Taliban are widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan’s military intelligence [the ISI], which, according to experts, explains the Taliban’s swift military successes,” CNN reported in 1996, leaving out the fact the CIA and the ISI collaborated on various projects, including the Osama bin Laden project. “Despite their clean chins and pressed uniforms, the ISI men are as deeply fundamentalist as any bearded fanatic; the ISI created the Taliban as their own instrument and still support it,” the Asia Times revealed in 2001, soon after nine eleven. Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars told the Times of India on March 7, 2001, “I warned [the CIA] that we were creating a monster…. The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan,” a “mistake” they shelled out around $3 billion to make and later declared to be their most successful operation on the books.

Mistake or not, the fact the Taliban were fanatical Muslims (who killed people for watching television or teaching girls) did not seem to bother the oil mega-corporation Unocal, as they wined and dine the wild-eyed Taliban in order to secure a pipeline deal (Unocal even flew Taliban representatives to their headquarters in Sugarland, Texas, incidentally the stomping grounds of accused criminal and former bug exterminator Tom Delay). “Oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan,” the Daily Telegraph reported on October 11, 1996.

Considering all of this greasy complicity with the Taliban—who went about killing thousands of infidels after they took over the country (with more than a little help from their friends in the ISI and CIA)—either Mr. Ereli suffers from long term memory loss or is blowing smoke out of a certain orifice.

None other than Robin Cook, the late and former British MP, admitted that al-Qaeda was basically a CIA creation. “Throughout the 80s [Osama bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan,” Cook told the Guardian. “Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. Inexplicably, and with disastrous consequences, it never appears to have occurred to Washington that once Russia was out of the way, Bin Laden’s organization would turn its attention to the west.” Cook knew what he was talking about—his Foreign Office portfolio included control of British Intelligence Agency MI-6 and the Government Communications Headquarters, as Uri Dowbendo points out.

Cook believed al-Qaeda was a monster that grew in the dark like some toxic fungus after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan. However, this makes little sense, especially considering the CIA considered its operation in Afghanistan (initially dubbed Operation Cyclone) so successful. In fact, so useful was (and remains) al-Qaeda, the U.S. employed them in Bosnia. Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University, who had “unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as in Bosnia,” according to the Guardian, believes there was a “secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims—some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in ‘the war against terrorism,’” resulting in “a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia.”

This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the Bosnian war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.

Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses that the US was “very closely involved” in the airlift. Mojahedin fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for especially hazardous operations.

Simply substitute the word “mojahedin” with “al-Qaeda” (initially a database of mojahedin) and you have an idea of what went down and what continues to go down.

As John Diamond, writing for USA Today on June 4, 2002, revealed, “U.S. intelligence overheard al-Qaeda operatives discussing a major pending terrorist attack in the weeks prior to Sept. 11 and had agents inside the terror group…. The disclosures add to a growing body of evidence to be examined in congressional hearings that open today into how the CIA, FBI and other agencies failed to seize on intelligence pointing to the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.” Or maybe there wasn’t an “intelligence failure” but another intelligence success like the one the CIA bragged about in Afghanistan. “The prevailing view on Capitol Hill is that U.S. intelligence had the goods and blew it by failing to recognize and connect warning signs.” In other words, we are expected to believe the CIA, an “expert at distorting intelligence to justify its own goals” (Mark Zepezauer), and responsible for successful covert operations in Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Chile, and elsewhere (and also responsible for not-so-successful operations in Vietnam and Cuba), is a clumsy, inept, and bumbling agency of ineffectual bureaucrats. Porter Goss, we are assured, is on the case.

Indeed, the CIA is so ineffectual at what it does—kill people (upward to six million, according to former CIA Station Chief in Angola, John Stockwell) and overthrow governments, many of them democratically elected—Osama bin Laden made the following erroneous comment: “I settled in Pakistan [in the 1980s], in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers, trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.” (See Clearing up America’s mess, the Guardian, December 18, 2001.)

“This lengthy document provides a comprehensive view of al-Qaida’s strategy in Iraq and globally,” the office of the director of national intelligence said about the letter from Ayman al-Zawahri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. “The document has not been edited in any way and is released in its entirety in both the Arabic and English translated forms. The United States government has the highest confidence in the letter’s authenticity.”

Of course, the government had the “highest confidence” in the authenticity of a purported Bin Laden audio tape released in 2003—that is until the Swiss took a crack at it. “The Lausanne-based Dalle Molle Institute for Perceptual Artificial Intelligence said it is 95-per-cent certain the tape does not feature the voice of the long-absent terrorist leader,” the Toronto Star reported. As Jason Kernahan writes, “we definitely have no reason whatsoever to believe that these tapes are authentic. While there have been reports of scientific voice analyses performed on them, these studies have been invariably done by CIA experts. In fact, on only one occasion was an independent analysis done. And while US officials were certain of that tape’s authenticity, Swedish scientists were equally convinced that it was a fake.” Recall Zepezauer’s comment the CIA is an “expert at distorting intelligence to justify its own goals.” It is also important to cite Philip Agee, a former CIA case officer, who noted “what the Agency [CIA] does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President.,” or in the case of Bush, the CIA is an instrument of the neocons (Bush has a difficult time staying on a bicycle, let alone staying on the job of running the country—or rather running it into the ground).

Ayman’s letter to Abu, issued for public consumption by an inherently deceptive office of “national intelligence,” promises to “extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq” and eventually “clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.” Not even Ayman al-Zawahri, reputedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer (before he was killed in northern Iraq), wouldn’t make a statement this stupid and inflammatory, playing right into the hand of the pro-Zionist neocons, who keep telling us scary Muslims want to kill the Jews and take over the world and install a global caliphate and force all of us—all 6 billion humans on the earth—to convert to Islam or have our heads sheared off like Nick Berg (the video supposedly showing Berg’s decapitation turns out to be highly suspect, according to medical experts).

All of this is simply more of the same—an unrelenting propaganda campaign designed to convince us through fear and psychological intimidation that the true enemy of “democracy” is not a corrupt government bought lock, stock, and barrel by transnational neolib corporations, not a dictatorial president bent on destroying the Constitution and installing a police state (in reaction to fake flu pandemics), but a wholly ridiculous threat posed by a handful of fanatical and medieval Muslims (who would be nothing without the husbandry of the CIA, British intelligence, and the ISI).

It remains to be seen if the American people even care about this sort of fakery anymore—dulled by the near constant stream of al-Qaeda news, all of it rigged and fraudulent—and that’s the sincerely dangerous aspect of this whole affair: for when Americans stop paying attention and no longer jump in fear and begin asking questions, the neocons and their covert warfare syndicate may decide it is time for a new nine eleven, more sensational and murderous than the first.