Al Qaeda Paradox: Freedom Fighters Who Hate us for our Freedom

Were we lied to about 9/11, lied to about Libya & Syria, or perhaps both?

Tony Cartalucci, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

On September 20, 2001, just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City, the attack on the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and the loss of a hijacked jetliner over Pennsylvania — attacks squarely blamed on “Al Qaeda” — US President George Bush would declare:

Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?”

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.

With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way.

We’re not deceived by their pretenses to piety.

We have seen their kind before. They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

Americans are asking, ‘How will we fight and win this war?’

It turns out America would fight the war by invading Afghanistan and waging a ten-year war against the Taliban who had nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Then similarly invade and occupy Iraq, opening the door to foreign “Al Qaeda” fighters to pour in and help wage a bloody civil war that effectively ended all meaningful resistance to US occupiers. And finally, overtly arm, train, fund, and even provide air support and political recognition for Al Qaeda affiliates, first in Libya, and now in Syria.

With Al Qaeda’s recent call for support of “pro-democracy” “freedom fighters” in Syria, people are literally asking, “How can they hate us for our freedom and our democratically elected governments, but then support and even die for those allegedly fighting for these very ideals?” Clearly we’ve been lied to about something.

We’ve Been Lied to About Everything

By all accounts, including admissions by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Osama Bin Laden’s organization that would become Al Qaeda was created during the Soviet-Afghan war in in the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s. The funding of these militants did not begin after the Soviet invasion, but actually several years before. US intervention in Afghanistan by training and arming Afghanistan’s Mujaheddin, along with Osama Bin Laden’s Arab fighters, is one of the leading factors that led to the murderous and protracted decade-long war, according to the Nation in an article titled, “Blowback, the Prequel.”

Photo: Former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski meeting with Osama Bin Laden, then leading the CIA’s Arab legionaries in Afghanistan. Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda would later spin off into regional terrorist organizations, covertly armed, trained, and protected by the CIA to this day, including LIFG in Libya, MEK in Iraq and Iran, and Baluchi terrorists in Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda would continue to fight after the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan, shifting to support Kosovo’s bid for independence from Serbia in the late 1990s. Al Qaeda-trained Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) militants garnered a Serbian response, which was then used by NATO as a pretext for intervention. NATO’s entry into the war led to the eventual carving up of the nation.

Again, the CIA was found to be propping up Bin Laden’s terrorist legionaries. Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević would later be removed from power by yet another arm of American interventionism, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) via Optor, now known as the infamous CANVAS organization which, with US funding, trained activists ahead of the now admittedly US-engineered “Arab Spring.”

More recently, Al Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), listed by the US State Department (page 1) as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” was armed, trained, funded, provided diplomatic and political recognition, and even lent air support and Western special forces to overthrow the government of Libya in 2011. Far from a conspiracy theory, two West Point Counter Terrorism Center reports confirm not only LIFG’s ties to Al Qaeda, but that they were demonstratively killing US and British troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq directly before returning to Libya to assist the US and NATO in regime change.

Now, French independent reporter Thierry Meyssan of VoltaireNet.org has exposed that LIFG commander Abdul Hakim Belhaj has left the Libyan capital of Tripoli and is directing the “Free Syrian Army” from the border of Turkey (a NATO member since 1952). Reports are already trickling in that the US, British, Arab League nations, and the EU are arming and assisting cross-border militants in their bid to overthrow the government of Syria.

We are told that the purpose of these revolutions are to instate “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy.” So why then is Al Qaeda supporting these uprisings when clearly this is what we’ve been told for 10 years are the very ideals that drive them to commit their heinous campaign of terror? The answer is simple: while Al Qaeda’s ranks are filled with impressionable, extremist ideologues, the leadership was initially created in the ’80s to fulfill US foreign policy, and to this very day still performs this function.

The West’s ambition to oust Qaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, or the government of Iran did not begin in 2011 with the “Arab Spring” in support of the “democratic aspirations” of the people; rather it was a documented conspiracy that predated 9/11, or even the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center — later exposed to be an FBI sting operations “gone wrong.” Rather, a campaign to entirely reorder the Middle East to Wall Street and London’s advantage was declared as early as 1991.

General Wesley Clark in a 2007 speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California, would reveal a document handed down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2001 indicating plans to attack and destroy the governments of 7 countries; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Lebanon and Libya.

Wesley Clark would also recall a conversation he had in 1991 with then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, regarding Desert Storm. Clark was told that America’s intervention in Iraq proved that the US could use its military force and the Soviets wouldn’t stop them. Wolfowitz said the US had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next superpower rose up and challenged Western hegemony. Clark claimed that this, along with the aftermath of 9/11, constituted a policy coup where Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other members of the of Project for a New American Century (PNAC) had hijacked US foreign policy to destabilize and turn the nations of the Middle East upside down.

While Wolfowitz and fellow Neo-Cons’ plans for global hegemony have been delayed on multiple occasions, realizing that they have indeed conspired for nearly two decades to reorder the Middle East as it suits them, combined with an increasing body of evidence proving that the “Arab Spring” was engineered by the West — even funded directly by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) chaired by a number of PNAC signatories — illustrates in new light the true purpose of Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is Wall Street’s Arab Foreign Legion

Al Qaeda is the impetus being used to advance PNAC. It was an FBI operation in 1993 disingenuously portrayed as a “terrorist attack” that was to serve as the justification for Wolfowitz’ post-Desert Storm blitzkrieg to “clean up the old Soviet client regimes.” It was Al Qaeda nearly ten years later that would “try again,” this time succeeding and giving the US justification to invade and overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, flanking Iran and beginning a covert war against the Islamic Republic; while more recently, in 2011, sowing chaos and regime change through US-funded opposition groups, labeled as the “Arab Spring.”

Al Qaeda was created in the mountains of Afghanistan to serve US foreign policy in the 1970s and ’80s; they were invoked as the perpetrators of the New York attacks in both 1993 and 2001 in attempts to justify extraordinary military interventions that, while long-planned, would have been impossible otherwise. Now Al Qaeda legions are in Libya and Syria carrying out regime change of governments long on Wall Street and London’s corporate-financier elites’ hit list.

Al Qaeda is America’s Arab foreign legion. The “War on Terror” is a fraud. We have been lied to about both 9/11 and the true nature of the “Arab Spring,” as well as the justification for the approaching war with Iran. We are not witnessing a convergence of random events and interests; we are witnessing a concerted, long-planned agenda being executed under the guise of increasingly tenuous propaganda that not only leads to a “new Middle East,” but direct confrontations with both Russia and China. This is not a battle for democracy and human rights, but rather a battle to fulfill the Hitlerian hegemonic ambitions fleshed out in the Project for a New American Century.

The solution? If it is corporate-financier elitists behind this destructive, self-serving agenda, then boycotting and replacing the corporate-financier interests they cultivate would undermine both their power and their ability to assert their agenda both domestically and abroad. Concurrently, exposing and spreading the truth to counteract the ignorance and deceit that this agenda is built upon is essential to undermining it and ultimately stopping it.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at
Land Destroyer Report. Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.