Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XXI

ADNAN KHASHOGGI, ALEXANDER VOLOSHIN & A 9/11 TRIAL RUN IN MOSCOW

By Alex Constantine

Two years before the towers in Manhattan crumbled under the weight of global political corruption, a spate of bombings in Russia left relatives and victims, CNN reported on September 10, 1999, "searching for answers."

At least 90 bodies, including seven children, were dragged from the wreckage of a bombed-out apartment building in Moscow in early September 1999. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in a televised speech, suspected terrorism; if so, he said, "we are facing a cunning, impudent, insidious and bloodthirsty opponent."1

CNN reported: "Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared a day of mourning on Monday for the victims of Russia's last three explosions and bombings, the Moscow blast, the bombing of a shopping center near the Kremlin and the September fourth car bomb that demolished another apartment building in Buinaksk, in the southern Russian region of Dagestan"

By the third week of September, the death toll rose to over 200. Chechen forces were behind the bombings, proclaimed Yeltsin, a belief shared by Yuri Luzkhov, the mayor of Moscow. Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo oversaw the investigation and announced that the Russian government "will consider itself within its rights to use all resources at its disposal to rebuff the aggression."2

And none of this added up. The harried Russian proles were quick to accept the government's explanation that Chechens were responsible for the blasts in Moscow and the Caucasus. But the Asia Times editorialized, "it is highly unlikely." And no one stood to benefit by the ourbreak of bombing but but, well, Yeltsin

In a statement of denial, Chechen leader Shamil Basayev stated, "We had nothing to do with the explosion in Moscow. We never kill civilians. This is not our style."

Provisions anticipating the Patriot Act were proposed. The Duma considered declaring a state of emergency. Until the bombings, the public had steadfastly opposed such measures, but even Yegor Stroyev, speaker of the Federation Council, the upper hall of parliament, had to admit that he'd firmly opposed emergency measures in the past but after the second Moscow explosion, well, there was an obvious "need to consolidate the legal base for combating the rampage of terrorism and crime."3

Still, there were the usual skeptics. Viktor Ilyukhin, a Communist leader, dismissed the bombings as provocateur actions: "Political hysteria is being fanned artificially, including by way of explosions to cancel parliamentary and presidential elections through a state of emergency."4

Day by day, the true, sordid details emerged in Versiya, Novaya Gazeta and UK's Independent to erode Yeltsin's credibility. It developed that there was more to the bomb plot than the government had revealed that its true origins lay not in the Russian satellites but in a meeting of conspirators held at the flat of Adnan Khashoggi

"It is clear that apartment explosions in Moscow would not have happened if somebody in the Russian political elite did not want them," Novaya Gazeta opined on January 24, 2000. "One by one, pieces of puzzle were put together. But there were a few details that were lacking. They began to clear in January, when Zhirinovsky and Chubais finally broke up. And at the same time, some of the participants started to tell their version of events. In the Versiya newspaper, there was an article about the meeting of [Alexander] Voloshin with [Shamil] Basayev in France."

Basayev was the radical Muslim leader who planned the violence on Dagestan. "This did not happen in Paris, as some of the newspapers reported later, but on the villa of Adnan Khashoggi, Arabic millionaire, on the Mediterranean."

French intelligence agents monitored the meeting and details surfaced in the public print. Khashoggi denied that he had attended the meeting. But Its main participants - Anton Surikov, "formerly" of Army special forces, and Aleksandr Voloshin, Yeltsin's Chief of Staff - offered no comment. When reporters asked Surikov, he claimed that he hadn't travelled abroad in years, especially not to France. This did not quite square with the public record, however, Just a few months before, he was in Washington, D.C. to meet with Yuri Maslukov, Russia's deputy prime minister, and Michel Camdessus, managing director of the IMF. Surikov had also flown to France on a couple of occasions - once in December 1994, and again in the summer of 1999. He had departed on June 23 aboard an Aeroflot bound for Paris, in fact, and returned from Nice on July 21, nearly a month later.5

A book on the Russian spy agency, Spetzsnaz GRU, written by former intelligence agents, reports that when the rebels entered from Chechnya, the government's forces were "commanded not to enter into battle with them and not to hinder the movement of the rebels."6

The 1999 bombing campaign punctuated an uneasy period of calm. From August 1996 through August 1999, Chechnya had been relatively still. "Hostilities resumed following a bold incursion from Chechnya into neighboring Dagestan by an 'international' force of Wahhabis," John Dunlop at the Hoover Institute reports, "whose titular leaders were the legendary Chechen field commander Shamil Basaev and the shadowy Arab commander Khattab. In September of 1999, there occurred the notorious terror bombings of large apartment complexes in Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk which served to infuriate the Russian populace in a way similar to the American public's reaction to the events of 11 September in this country. On 23 September, Moscow once again commenced the bombing of Chechnya, and the second Russo-Chechen war of the past decade was on."7

Alexander Voloshin, who attended the meeting at Khashoggi's villa, is a singular political figure in Russia, outspoken in his support of the United States, in temperament comparable to an American Cold Warrior, Al Haig or Donald Rumsfeld. On October 23, 2003, the Guardian reported that Vladimir Putin's chief of staff was at the center of "a furious row" between Moscow and Kiev "after he reportedly suggested Russia might bomb Ukraine if it did not back down in a diplomatic tiff over a small island between the two former Soviet states. Alexander Voloshin, the head of the president's administration, made the remarks while he was briefing Ukrainian journalists at the Kremlin. The row is over 100 metres of sand."8

In the end, however, Voloshin was forced out of government not for his ties to the meeting at Khashoggi's villa, or to terrorists, but to Big Oil:

Putin's powerful chief of staff resigns Voloshin's resignation over arrest of top oil tycoon widens political
Scandal Pakistan Daily Times November 1, 2004

MOSCOW: Moscow press reported Wednesday that Kremlin's powerful chief of staff had resigned in protest of the arrest of a top oil tycoon in a widening political scandal on the eve of Russian parliamentary elections. The Vedomosti business daily said that President Vladimir Putin had accepted Alexander Voloshin's resignation on Monday night after meeting for several hours with top Kremlin officials.

Newspaper reports said that Voloshin had handed in his resignation on Saturday only hours after Russia's richest man, Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was hauled in by secret service men at gunpoint in a Siberian airport and flown to Moscow for questioning.

Voloshin, 47, is seen as one of the last figures in the Kremlin to have hung on from the era of Putin's predecessor Boris Yeltsin and a leader of an administration clan known as "the Family" that battled the hawkish "siloviki" camp of former secret service agents that recently emerged in Putin's court. He was seen as a strong backer of big business and an instrumental Kremlin aide who managed to skilfully mediate between the various administration factions and parliament lawmakers on key economic reform issues.

His potential resignation had been rumoured in Moscow for months as the Family which supported big businesses including Yukos was being squeezed out by the "siloviki" clan.

Western investors said that Voloshin's resignation if officially confirmed would mark an escalation of political instability on the eve of December 7 parliamentary elections.

"Assuming Voloshin's departure is confirmed today, this will only underline the seriousness of the political crisis resulting from Putin's decision to deal with the political problem of Khodorkovsky using KGB methods," the United Financial Group wrote in a research note. The investment house noted that Voloshin "seems to have made himself indispensable to Putin as a discreet but effective administrator with a good grasp of the reform policy agenda and adept at arbitrating between competing interests." Besides heading Putin's administration, Voloshin for the past four years has also served as chairman of the board of the United Energy System electricity monopoly that has been struggling to undertake reforms for the past four years.

But the United Financial Group predicted that Putin would probably try to seek a balance within his administration and was unlikely to give the post to any of the top members of the secret service Kremlin factions. Voloshin became deputy head of Yeltsin's administration in 1998 and became chief of staff the following year. He was attributed with drafting economic portions of Yeltsin's speeches. Putin kept Voloshin on his post when he took the presidency following Yeltsin's abrupt resignation on December 31, 1999.9

NOTES

1) Jill Dougherty, "At least 90 dead in Moscow apartment blast," CNN report, September 10, 1999.
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9909/10/russia.explosion.03/

2) STRATFOR.COM, "Who gains from the Moscow apartment bombings?" Asia Times, September 14, 1999. http://www.atimes.com/c-asia/AI15Ag01.html

3) Ibid.

4) Dougherty.

5) Boris Kagarlitsky, 'We Donít Talk To Terrorists. But We Help Them?' Novaya Gazeta, [translation by Olga Kryazheva, research intern, Center for Defense Information, Washington DC], January 24, 2000.
http://geocities.com/chechenistan/conspiracy.html

6) John B. Dunlop, 'The Second Russo-Chechen War Two Years On," Presentation at U.S. and World Affairs Seminar, Hoover Institution, October 17, 2001.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:nGpCwJsA3z0J:www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1233969/posts+Voloshin+and+khashoggi

7) Ibid.

8) Nick Paton Walsh, "Russian official condemned for joke about bombing Ukraine," Guardian, October 23, 2003.
http://www.rusnet.nl/news/2003/10/23/currentaffairs04.shtml

9) http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_30-10-2003_pg4_1

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Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists

Part XX:

PAKISTAN'S KALASHNIKOV CULTURE AND THE CIA-ISI-SAUDI AXIS

By Alex Constantine

While a fugitive in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef was instrumental in several bombings and a plot to kill Benazir Bhutto, then prime minister. Today, Mrs. Bhutto chairs the Pakistan People's Party, founded in 1967 by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In July 1977, Mr. Bhutto was unseated as prime minister himself in a CIA-planned coup led by General Mohammed Zia Al-Haq. Benazir has long experience with the political intrigues of the Pakistani contras: "As a moderate, progressive, democratically-elected woman prime minister of Pakistan," Mrs. Bhutto said in a 2001 interview, "I was a threat to the fundamentalist zealots on multiple levels and targeted by them." The zealots, of course, had a distinct advantage: "The support of sympathetic elements within Pakistan's security apparatus and the financial support of people like Osama Bin Laden."

Bhutto had shut down an al Qaeda-affiliated university in Peshawar, and that brought retaliation - "My government was destabilized," she says; Ramzi Yousef had been caught, extradited and "money was pilfered and laundered from state banks to fund the campaigns of opposition parties." The interrogation of Yousef revealed "two separate assassination attempts in 1993. Osama bin Laden personally spent over $10 million in late 1989 in support of a motion of no confidence to topple my government. And ultimately, with the active support of elements of the Pakistani military, my two democratically elected governments were sacked and elections rigged to ensure that my party would not return to power. Beware the power of zealots who are well-funded, well-armed and supported by elements of your own government!"1

Yousef was arrested at the Su-Casa Guest House in Islamabad on February 7, 1995 by Pakistani police, agents of the FBI and U.S. Diplomatic Security Service.

In November, Bhutto was dismissed as "paranoid" by clerical opponents when she condemned the intrusion of religion into politics, and spoke in favor of a liberal democratic state. She also denounced the irrelevant, bomb-throwing fundamentalists agitating for her removal as "western agents" financed "by the CIA."2

Bhutto takes a dim view of the current administration under Pervez Musharraf. In a recent Guardian editorial, she saw that in Bush's war or terror, Musharraf "gets to play good cop and earn Washington's pleasure to continue his dictatorship." Unfortunately, "eyebrows are raised as to why leading al Qaeda militants found it necessary to hide" - and continue to operate, like Yousef and Murad and Atta - "in a land run by Washington's key ally' in the war against terror."3

US CENTCOM CHIEF MEETS MUSHARRAF

Islamabad, Oct 6, 2003, IRNA - ... Pakistan is a close ally of the United States in the war against al-Qaeda ... and US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has praised Pakistan's cooperation with the United States

American news outlets have been all too willing to distort the Islamic threat and report dubious federal pronouncements without question. At the same time, U.S. involvement in terrorism, particularly the "conservative" variety, is downplayed.

The bonds between the CIA, according to Australian reporter Ben Vidgen, "anti-Communist elements of the Vatican and Hitler's men are not slim. Since the final days of World War II, the totalitarian seekers have made use of people's hatred by establishing a clandestine fascist network." The said network would, of course, include "government- endorsed death squads" prowling the countryside like the Black Reichswehr of proto-Nazi Germany ... or the Nicaraguan contras.

Pakistan's faith-based death squads "possess the financial, logistical and political support of agents whose influence equals or betters the ruling system's power. The above is a premise wholeheartedly agreed with by the US-based right-wing Center for International Affairs (a favourite stomping ground of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski). The Center for International Affairs (and its close cousin, the Center for Strategic and International Studies) utilised this hypothesis to promote the perception that the Soviet Union lay behind all incidents of international terrorism. Their prestige and influence was so great that when the CIA's own analysts could not find verifiable proof of a Soviet terrorist conspiracy, the CIA director, William Casey, chose to rely on the nformation of journalist Claire Sterling in her book, The Terror Network. Read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year,' responded Casey in fury. The irony was that Claire Sterling's book had used material that was in fact part of a CIA propaganda scheme."4

In November 2001, members of a militant group calling itself Mohammed's Army hijacked a bus in Pakistan after the driver ignored a demand to turn off the muzak. Police caught up with them and seized firearms, grenades, a variety of arms ... and weapons permits issued by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Agency.5

"Since its founding in 1948," the Baltimore Sun reports, "the ISI has grown into a giant intelligence and covert operations network with an estimated 10,000 employees - an invisible government,' some say - that wields considerable influence over Pakistani foreign policy and sometimes meddles in domestic politics."6

It is well-known that the ISI was a CIA cut-out in the arming of Afghan guerillas, and that BCCI laundered opium profits for the war. (Dozens of al Qaeda histories and timelines on the Internet weave the Byzantine maze of Bush administration, CIA and bin Laden connections to BCCI, so the banking network won't be discussed in this account unless necessary.)

There are critical, even shocking gaps in the files among those kept between 1982 through 1992. Not all is known about the CIA-BCCI scandal or some of principal contacts in the Middle East, including BCCI shareholder Kamal Adham and a favored client, Adnan Khashoggi. However, as The New Yorker reported on March 17, 2003, when Khashoggi embargoed missiles to Iran on behalf of North's NSC, he "borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation."

Investigations of Adnan Khashoggi have cost American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars - and they always come up dry due to backstage intrigues.

But there is a substantial record of Bush ties to the ISI and bin Laden.

The bin Ladens and their Saudi business partners owned Texas property banks, airlines. Intensive lobbying efforts, Wayne Madsen reports, "carried out with the help of Texans like Houston socialite and TV personality Joanne Herring, Baron and Baroness di Portanova, and Vice President George H. W. Bush, in concert with Richard Perle, former New Hampshire Senator Gordon Humphrey, the Congressional Jewish Caucus, and the ever-enigmatic shady operator Richard Armitage, radicals like bin Laden and his associates, Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri and Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf (the founder of a Saudi-financed and ISI-organized Terrorist University' which spawned the Philippine terrorist Abu Sayyaf Group'), were able to cobble together an impressive jihadist army armed with stockpiles of Soviet-made weapons from Egypt, captured Soviet weapons from Israel, and tons of cash from billionaire Saudi benefactors.

George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush's Florida election fixer' and newly-named Bush debate coach James Baker III have both been honored guests, according to The Wall Street Journal, at the bin Laden family's palatial headquarters in Jeddah. With the active support of Pakistan's military dictator Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq (who was killed along with the U.S. ambassador, Pakistan's ISI chief Akhtar Abdul Rahman, and others in a mysterious 1988 plane crash determined by an unpublished Pakistani court of inquiry report to have been caused by the pilot being knocked out by gas in the cockpit), the Afghan mujaheddin became increasingly radicalized in the Wahhabi traditions."7

Saudi Royals furnished the madrasas, and Pakistan's ISI whipped them into fundamentalist soldiers for Allah (and the CIA).

NOTES

1) "A Former Pakistani Prime Minister Weighs In: Benazir Bhutto," Slate.com, Sept. 21, 2001.
http://slate.msn.com/id/1008335/

2) "Bhutto's paranoid accusations," Independent Center for Strategic Studies and Analysis.
http://icssa.org/ICSS%20-%20theme_secularism_Bhuttos_paranoid.htm

3) Benazir Bhutto, "Dictatorship and religious extremism are fuelled by gross inequality," Guardian, Aug. 9, 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,1279225,00.html

4) Ben C. Vidgen, "A State of Terror: How many 'terrorist' groups has your government established, sponsored or networked lately?" Nexus, February-March 1996.
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/terror.html

5) Frank Langfitt, "Pakistani spies long linked to militants - Agency gave backing to Taliban, Kashmir fighters, mujahedeen," Baltimore Sun, November 25, 2001.

6) Ibid.

7) Wayne Madsen, "Osama bin Laden: a Texas-style Republican in Muslim clothing," Online Journal, Sept. 12, 2004.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/091204Madsen/091204madsen.html

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