INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
Britain recruited terrorists, Meacher claims |
|
from The Asan News
Entered into the database on Monday, October 03rd, 2005 @ 10:42:53 MST |
|
An astonishing claim that M16 recruited Muslim extremists in Britain
for terror training abroad has been made by Oldham MP and former cabinet minister
Michael Meacher. Mr Meacher also suggest that a British Muslim held under sentenced
of death in Pakistan for beheading a US journalist is being kept alive because
he was a British double agent. The Oldham West and Royton MP makes these sensational claims in an article
for Asian News' sister paper, The Guardian. The former Environment Secretary claims that Britain's 'overseas' security
organisation, M16, set about recruiting UK Muslims directing them to support
US efforts to overthrow communist governments in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
He highlights a Delhi-based research foundation that estimates anything up to
200 UK Muslims could have undergone training in overseas terrorist camps under
the protection of the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, who were backing the
armed Islamic insurrection against the Afghan communist regime and its Soviet
backers. He writes: "During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal
prosecutor John Loftus reported that the British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun
group..to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against
the Serbs in Kosovo." The now disbanded al-Muhajiroun group held meetings in Manchester after 9/11
praising the courage of the suicide bombers and claimed to be helping UK Muslims
to fight US troops in Afghanistan. Mr Meacher also highlights the case of UK-born Muslim Omar Saeed Sheikh, sentenced
to death for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Mr Meacher writes that Sheikh has been allowed 32 appeals against his sentence,
the last being adjourned "indefinitely". He says the same Delhi foundation
describes Sheikh as a British agent. Mr Meacher adds: "This is all the more remarkable when this is the same
Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired
$100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks,
as confirmed by Dennis Lomel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit." Mr Meacher’s argument is that the UK and US security service do not want
a proper investigation into these links because it would expose how they encouraged
and helped to recruit Islamic 'warriors' when it suited their purposes but that
these same forces eventually turned on the west, inflamed by what they saw as
anti-Islamic occupations and pro-Israeli international policies. (Read the full Guardian article below) OLDHAM MP Michael Meacher argues Britain’s security services helped to
create Islamic warriors who eventually bit back against the west The videotape of the suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan has switched the focus
of the London bombings away from the establishment view of brainwashed, murderous
individuals and highlighted a starker political reality. While there can be
no justification for horrific killings of this kind, they need to be understood
against the ferment of the last decade radicalising Muslim youth of Pakistani
origin living in Europe. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US funded large
numbers of jihadists through Pakistan's secret intelligence service, the ISI.
Later the US wanted to raise another jihadi corps, again using proxies, to help
Bosnian Muslims fight to weaken the Serb government's hold on Yugoslavia. Those
they turned to included Pakistanis in Britain. According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation,
a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir
Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed
from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The
report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan,
trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly,
this was "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American
intelligence agencies". As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a
green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organisations,
including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia - an episode that
calls into question the credibility of the subsequent "war on terror". For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran
and Saudi Arabia destabilise the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were also
allowed to move further east to Kosovo. By the end of the fighting in Bosnia
there were tens of thousands of Islamist insurgents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo;
many then moved west to Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Less well known is evidence of the British government's relationship with a
wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer,
the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence
had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with
British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo. Since July Scotland
Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid
Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings. According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but
was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia,
but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning
about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double
agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6. One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia
was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh. He is now in jail in Pakistan under sentence
of death for the killing of the US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 - although
many (including Pearl's widow and the US authorities) doubt that he committed
the murder. However, reports from Pakistan suggest that Sheikh continues to
be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain. Sheikh was recruited as a student by Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which
operates a network in Britain. It has actively recruited Britons from universities
and colleges since the early 1990s, and has boasted of its numerous British
Muslim volunteers. Investigations in Pakistan have suggested that on his visits
there Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London suicide bombers, contacted members
of two outlawed local groups and trained at two camps in Karachi and near Lahore.
Indeed the network of groups now being uncovered in Pakistan may point to senior
al-Qaida operatives having played a part in selecting members of the bombers'
cell. The Observer Research Foundation has argued that there are even "grounds
to suspect that the [London] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his
jail in Pakistan". Why then is Omar Sheikh not being dealt with when he is already under sentence
of death? Astonishingly his appeal to a higher court against the sentence was
adjourned in July for the 32nd time and has since been adjourned indefinitely.
This is all the more remarkable when this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the
behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed
Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by
Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit. Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the
US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought
to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: "To date, the US government
has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks.
Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" - a statement
of breathtaking disingenuousness. All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks
and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in
the west, including Britain. The extraordinary US forbearance towards Omar Sheikh,
its restraint towards the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Dr AQ Khan, selling
nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the huge US military assistance
to Pakistan and the US decision last year to designate Pakistan as a major non-Nato
ally in south Asia all betoken a deeper strategic set of goals as the real priority
in its relationship with Pakistan. These might be surmised as Pakistan providing
sizeable military contingents for Iraq to replace US troops, or Pakistani troops
replacing Nato forces in Afghanistan. Or it could involve the use of Pakistani
military bases for US intervention in Iran, or strengthening Pakistan as a base
in relation to India and China. Whether the hunt for those behind the London bombers can prevail against these
powerful political forces remains to be seen. Indeed it may depend on whether
Scotland Yard, in its attempts to uncover the truth, can prevail over MI6, which
is trying to cover its tracks and in practice has every opportunity to operate
beyond the law under the cover of national security. |