Al-Qaeda

Ventura Attacks Media for Criticizing Free Speech

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Attacked for simply asking questions

On the Alex Jones Show today, former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura complained right out of the gate about the fact the corporate media consistently attempts to squelch any questioning of the government. “I can’t believe how I simply asked some questions and the way you’re attacked… for simply asking questions… has our country become that, that you’re not even publicly allowed to question the government?”

Alex responded by stating that the government and its corporate media lapdog — alternately an attack dog when celebrities such as Ventura dare step outside established parameters — are disturbed by the fact Alex’s show is an increasingly popular venue for the likes of Charlie Sheen, Willie Nelson, Ventura, and a host of others unable to ask questions and get a fair hearing in the corporate media arena.

Ventura admitted that he did not want to “believe the worst” about 9/11 and wanted to accept the official fairy tale version, but after Bush and the neocons invaded Iraq, when the government claimed al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, he sincerely began to ask questions and confront the lies perpetuated by the government and the corporate media.

Appearance on Hannity and Colmes

On April 2, in an appearance of Alex’s show, Ventura admitted that watching the documentary Loose Change, at the insistence of his son, changed his mind about the official fairy tale version of events. “When I finally did watch it I went through every emotion you could imagine, from laughing, crying, getting sick to my stomach, to the whole emotional thing,” Jesse said. “To me questions haven’t been answered and are not being answered about 9/11,” including pertinent questions about Building 7. “Two planes struck two buildings….but how is it that a third building fell 5 hours later?” asked Ventura, “How could this building just implode into its own footprint 5 hours later — that’s my first question — the 9/11 Commission didn’t even devote one page to that in their big volume of investigation.”

Read moreVentura Attacks Media for Criticizing Free Speech

Lieberman Demands YouTube Censorship

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Joe Lieberman, senator and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman, wants to censor what you watch on Google and YouTube. Lieberman has sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, accusing the corporation of allowing “offensive material” on its site, namely “videos produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups.” Joe wants these taken down immediately and demands Google “prevent them from reappearing.” No word if Schmidt has responded, but a letter sent by a bigwig commissar such as Lieberman is nothing to take lightly. Schmidt and his corporate lawyers have likely confabbed.

“Today, Islamist terrorist organizations rely extensively on the Internet to attract supporters and advance their cause. The framework for much of this Internet campaign is described in a bipartisan staff report released last week by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which I am privileged to chair, titled Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat,” writes Lieberman. “The report explains, in part, how al-Qaeda created and manages a multi-tiered online media operation that produces content intended to enlist followers in countries all over the world, including the United States. Central to this media campaign is the branding of content with an icon or logo to guarantee authenticity that the content was produced by al-Qaeda or allied organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam (a.k.a Ansar al-Sunnah) or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb.”

Or how about an “allied organization” such as the CIA, military intelligence or one of its cutouts? “An expert computer analyst has presented evidence that so-called ‘Al-Qaeda’ tapes are routinely digitally doctored and has also unwittingly exposed an astounding detail that clearly indicates a Pentagon affiliated organization in the U.S. is directly responsible for releasing the videos,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote last August. Neal Krawetz, a researcher and computer security consultant, examined the image quantization table of a 2006 Ayman al-Zawahiri tape and made a fascinating discovery – al-Qaeda’s As-Sahab logo (supposedly the media arm of al-Qaeda) was placed on the tape at the same time as the IntelCenter logo. As it turns out, IntelCenter, notorious for releasing al-Qaeda videos, is run by Ben Venzke, former director of intelligence at a company called iDefense, a Verisign company. Jim Melnick, a senior military psy-op intelligence officer who worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld, is billed as iDefense’s director of threat intelligence. In short, there is a distinct possibility the al-Qaeda videos mentioned by Lieberman are fake.

Read moreLieberman Demands YouTube Censorship

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

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Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.
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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The proposal for a new American prison at Bagram underscores the daunting scope and persistence of the United States military’s detention problem, at a time when Bush administration officials continue to say they want to close down the facility at Guantánamo Bay.

Military officials have long been aware of serious problems with the existing detention center in Afghanistan, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. After the prison was set up in early 2002, it became a primary site for screening prisoners captured in the fighting. Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used widely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002, after being repeatedly struck by American soldiers.

Read moreU.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

Euro 2008 Attack Hype May Be Veiled Neo-Con Threat

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U.S. and Israel furious with Switzerland over Iran gas deal, Swiss opposition to Israeli treatment of Palestinians

Threatening to capsize a $2.1 billion injection into the European economy and making hundreds of thousands of people fear for their lives, authorities and the media today lent credence to an anonymous Internet posting that alleged Al-Qaeda were planning to attack the Euro 2008 soccer tournament.

Presumably disinterested in attacking “the Great Satan” of America the terrorist group are now apparently turning their attention to that other evil empire…..erm…..Switzerland.

That’s right, Al-Qaeda are targeting those bastions of evil Switzerland and Austria for devastation, according to Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, despite the fact that both countries condemned the Iraq war.

“The Euro 2008 tournament is a target cited by the Islamist terrorist network,” federal police spokesman Juerg Buehler told Swiss newspaper La Liberte.

He said messages had been posted on Islamist websites and police were “following the situation very closely”.

One of the messages urges terrorists to “transform the safest countries in Europe to the hell seen in Iraq or Afghanistan”.

“The time has come for the fighters of the faith. They must make their voices heard,” said another.

Brushing aside the media’s ludicrous and transitory stupidity of accepting an anonymous Internet posting at face value and immediately broadcasting it as gospel, the contention that global terrorists’ enemy number one is the tranquil haven of Switzerland, a country that has not been to war since 1515, is beyond belief. However, the real reason behind the Swiss being threatened may have more to do with recent geopolitical developments than anything else.

Read moreEuro 2008 Attack Hype May Be Veiled Neo-Con Threat

Probe of USS Cole Bombing Unravels

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ADEN, Yemen — Almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials.

Jamal al-Badawi, a Yemeni who helped organize the plot to bomb the Cole as it refueled in this Yemeni port on Oct. 12, 2000, has broken out of prison twice. He was recaptured both times, but then secretly released by the government last fall. Yemeni authorities jailed him again after receiving complaints from Washington. But U.S. officials have so little faith that he’s still in his cell that they have demanded the right to perform random inspections.

Two suspects, described as the key organizers, were captured outside Yemen and are being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Many details of their alleged involvement remain classified. It is unclear when — or if — they will be tried by the military.

The collapse of the Cole investigation offers a revealing case study of the U.S. government’s failure to bring al-Qaeda operatives and their leaders to justice for some of the most devastating attacks on American targets over the past decade.

A week after the Cole bombing, President Bill Clinton vowed to hunt down the plotters and promised, “Justice will prevail.” In March 2002, President Bush said his administration was cooperating with Yemen to prevent it from becoming “a haven for terrorists.” He added: “Every terrorist must be made to live as an international fugitive with no place to settle or organize, no place to hide, no governments to hide behind and not even a safe place to sleep.”

Since then, Yemen has refused to extradite Badawi and an accomplice to the United States, where they have been indicted on murder charges. Other Cole conspirators have been freed after short prison terms. At least two went on to commit suicide attacks in Iraq.

“After we worked day and night to bring justice to the victims and prove that these Qaeda operatives were responsible, we’re back to square one,” said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and a lead investigator into the bombing. “Do they have laws over there or not? It’s really frustrating what’s happening.”

To this day, al-Qaeda trumpets the attack on the Cole as one of its greatest military victories. It remains an improbable story: how two suicide bombers smiled and waved to unsuspecting U.S. sailors in Aden’s harbor as they pulled their tiny fishing boat alongside the $1 billion destroyer and blew a gaping hole in its side.

Read moreProbe of USS Cole Bombing Unravels

FEMA To Help Run 8-Day Disaster & Terror Drill

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FEMA announced recently that they will be conducting a national disaster exercise called National Level Exercise 2-08 (NLE 2-08) from May 1st through May 8th. The purpose of this exercise is to prepare and respond to multiple incidents including natural disasters and terrorist incidents. Specifically the exercise involves a Category 4 hurricane impacting the Mid Atlantic Coast and the National Capitol Region as well as multiple terrorist attacks in Washington State, an accidental chemical agent release in Oregon and assorted aerospace events in North American airspace. Considering that the U.S. government conducted drills and exercises like Operation Northern Vigilance, Tripod II, among others to serve as cover for the government sponsored false flag terror attacks of 9/11, we need to pay close attention to these government sponsored drills and exercises. A similar scenario also occurred during the 7/7 terror attacks in London. On that day, drills depicting events mirroring the actual terror attacks were run at the exact same time the bombings took place. The odds of these being two completely random events is so incredibly unlikely that it boggles the mind. NLE 2-08 is a wide ranging exercise that will include not only FEMA but the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Transportation Command, the National Guard, USNORTHCOM, NORAD and Canada Command. Much like TOPOFF-4/Vigilant Shield 08 a martial law exercise that took place last year involving many of the same government institutions, we definitely need to keep track of NLE 2-08.

Below is taken from FEMA’s press release on this upcoming drill.

Read moreFEMA To Help Run 8-Day Disaster & Terror Drill

NYC Is Getting a New High-Tech Defense Perimeter.

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Photo: Vincent Laforet

The Manhattan Project: Current and Future Security Measures for New York’s Financial District

At the southernmost end of Brooklyn, just off Dead Horse Bay, there’s a weather-beaten helipad where the New York Police Department keeps a gray unmarked twin-engine Bell 412 helicopter. Detective Brendan Galligan ushers me aboard. “We don’t really let people see this,” he says.

We climb in behind the pilot and find ourselves facing a console with three screens: One shows a map of the city; another, an interface for checking license plates and addresses; and the third, the view from a gyro-stabilized L-3 Wescam camera attached to the chopper’s nose. The camera can see clear across the city, in both the visible and the infrared slices of the spectrum; then it can broadcast the images to police headquarters using an onboard microwave transmitter.

The helicopter, part of New York City’s antiterror arsenal, takes off and climbs to 1,000 feet in the afternoon sunshine. Passing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Galligan scans for suspicious trucks lingering on approach ramps. Over the Staten Island Ferry, he explains how police routinely use the chopper to look for boats that might be trailing too closely. Then, as we swing past the gaping World Trade Center site, the 22-year veteran adjusts the joystick to turn the camera eastward, filling the third screen with the towers of lower Manhattan: the center of the center of the bull’s-eye.

The New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank, City Hall, four major bridges and tunnels — a bomb at any of these places could kill hundreds, cost the city billions, and rattle the world financial system. Al Qaeda has hit lower Manhattan twice, in 1993 and 2001, and officials say that several other plots have been broken up since.

City agencies have done their best to harden the financial district in the years since 2001. Today, explosives-sniffing dogs and two truckloads of cops wearing military-style body armor and waving M-4 machine guns surround the flag-draped stock exchange. Black metallic barriers rise out of the asphalt, blocking traffic on Wall Street, while concrete planters and strategically parked trucks keep vehicles off Broad Street. Some of the other streets surrounding the exchange have been cut off to pedestrians, and only invited guests are allowed inside. “Closed since 9/11,” the guard tells visitors.

But you can’t block off every street or have a guard by every door. There’s no budget for that, and no one would want to live or work in that kind of armed camp anyway. “You can make a justification for putting bollards in front of every building,” says a former high-ranking NYPD counterterrorism official. “But pretty soon you can’t walk anywhere. People leave.”

So New York has an audacious blueprint to wrap a high tech cloak around lower Manhattan. It will provide the most sophisticated armor of any major urban area in the world — one that relies on brains as much as brawn, on barely visible technology as much as brute stopping power. And the chopper I’m in will be just a small piece of it.

Read moreNYC Is Getting a New High-Tech Defense Perimeter.

PENTAGON CAMPAIGN: Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks

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A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage
from inside the TV and radio networks.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Correction Appended

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Read morePENTAGON CAMPAIGN: Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage
from inside the TV and radio networks

Narco aggression

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“Since 2001, poppy fields, once banned by the Taliban, have mushroomed again. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium last year, enough to make 93 per cent of the world’s heroin supply.”

U.S. foreign intelligence official: “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favourite business.”

Russia, facing a catastrophic rise in drug addiction, accuses the U.S. military of involvement in drug trafficking from Afghanistan.


Afghan workers cutting open poppy bulbs, the first stage in the harvesting process,
in Jalalabad. Afghanistan produced 8,200 tonnes of opium last year, enough to make
93 per cent of the world’s heroin supply.

COULD it be that the American military in Afghanistan is involved in drug trafficking? Yes, it is quite possible, according to Russia’s Ambassador to Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov.

Commenting on reports that the United States military transport aviation is used for shipping narcotics out of Afghanistan, the Russian envoy said there was no smoke without fire.

Read moreNarco aggression

Petraeus Testimony Next Week Will Signal Iran Attack

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection of law, is forthcoming from Random House in March, 2008.

06/04/08 “ICH’ — – April 5, 2008. Today the London Telegraph reported that “British officials gave warning yesterday that America’s commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government. A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran’s intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian militiary facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment.”

The neocon lacky Petraeus has had his script written for him by Cheney, and Petraeus together with neocon warmonger Ryan Crocker, the US governor of the Green Zone in Baghdad, will present Congress next Tuesday and Wednesday with the lies, for which the road has been well paved by neocon propagandists such as Kimberly Kagan, that “the US must recognize that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq.”

Don’t expect Congress to do anything except to egg on the attack. On April 3 the International Herald Tribune reported that senators and representatives have made millions of dollars from their investments in defense companies totaling $196 million. Rep. Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is already on board with the attack on Iran. The London Telegraph quotes Skelton: “Iran is the bull in the china shop. In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi’ite groups, whether they be political or military.”

Read morePetraeus Testimony Next Week Will Signal Iran Attack

Homeland Ministry Plans Raytheon “Ray Guns” at Airports

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The DHS, affectionately called the “Ministry” here because it resembles something out of Orwell’s famous novel, wants to fit airports with ray guns. I kid you not. “The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will consider fitting high-power microwave electropulse rayguns at US airports, in order to defend against the threat of terrorists firing portable anti-aircraft missiles at airliners,” reports Lewis Page for The Register. “American defense heavyweight Raytheon would partner with Israel’s Rafael and Kongsberg of Norway to provide the technology, according to a report in Flight International. The proposed kit is known as ‘Vigilant Eagle’, and is competing for DHS securo-dollars with defensive systems that could be fitted to the airliners themselves – for instance BAE Systems’ JetEye.”

Okay, tell me this does not sound like another “defense industry” scam, yet another scheme to make billions of dollars. Sure, there is the possibility somebody with a rocket launcher may take out an airliner. But if al-Qaeda hates our freedom, why haven’t’ they done this already? Is al-Qaeda conducting a war against the Great Satan, one with battles strung over decades? At this rate, it will take a thousand years to install the Great Caliph/Khalifah.

Read moreHomeland Ministry Plans Raytheon “Ray Guns” at Airports

Hayden: White Boy al-Qaeda on the Rise

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“Al-Qaeda, in its haven in western Pakistan, is training operatives who are ‘western’ in appearance, making it easier for them to get past U.S. airport security, Central Intelligence Director Michael Hayden said,” reports Bloomberg.

Does anybody who looks “western” have an easy time getting past airport security? Mr. Hayden needs to visit an airport and see for himself — just about everybody, from grandmothers to toddlers, are under suspicion, even if they look Scandinavian. It has nothing to do with actual suspicion. It has to do with sending a message: you live in a police state now, get used to it, and if you don’t want to end up dead in a holding cell like Carol Ann Gotbaum, you’ll submit and not complain.

Of course, Mr. Hayden, as the head honcho of the CIA, is “catapulting the propaganda,” as Bush might call it. Now that al-Qaeda operatives look like stock brokers and cashiers at the local Stop ‘n Gas, we need to push ahead with the control grid, now only partially in place. Our rulers think we need to hear this kind of nonsense every few weeks, just to remind us and get us accustomed to those CCTV cameras everywhere and the NSA vacuuming up our telephone conversations and emails. It’s all to protect us from the white boy al-Qaeda.

Read moreHayden: White Boy al-Qaeda on the Rise

97 percent of US death toll came after ‘Mission Accomplished’

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iraqcoffins.jpg

BAGHDAD (AFP) – The death toll of US soldiers in the five-year Iraq conflict has hit 4,000 in what the US military said Monday was a “tragic” loss of lives after four troops were killed in a Baghdad bombing.

The four soldiers died when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb while on patrol late Sunday in southern Baghdad, bringing the overall toll to 4,000, according to an AFP tally based on independent website.

Read more97 percent of US death toll came after ‘Mission Accomplished’

70 Reasons To Doubt The Offical Story of 9/11

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70 reasons to doubt…
DISTURBING FACTS ABOUT THE 9/11 ATTACKS
John Doraemi

Read more70 Reasons To Doubt The Offical Story of 9/11

Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook: ‘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’

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At around 2:20 pm, on 6 August 2005, whilst walking down Ben Stack in Sutherland, Scotland, Cook suddenly suffered a severe heart attack, collapsed and lost consciousness.
(Source: Wikipedia)

CIA Whistleblower talks about Heart Attack gun

YouTube

– The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means (Guardian, by Robin Cook,  July 8, 2005):

In the absence of anyone else owning up to yesterday’s crimes, we will be subjected to a spate of articles analysing the threat of militant Islam. Ironically they will fall in the same week that we recall the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, when the powerful nations of Europe failed to protect 8,000 Muslims from being annihilated in the worst terrorist act in Europe of the past generation.Osama bin Laden is no more a true representative of Islam than General Mladic, who commanded the Serbian forces, could be held up as an example of Christianity. After all, it is written in the Qur’an that we were made into different peoples not that we might despise each other, but that we might understand each other.

Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. 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 organisation would turn its attention to the west.

The danger now is that the west’s current response to the terrorist threat compounds that original error. So long as the struggle against terrorism is conceived as a war that can be won by military means, it is doomed to fail. The more the west emphasises confrontation, the more it silences moderate voices in the Muslim world who want to speak up for cooperation. Success will only come from isolating the terrorists and denying them support, funds and recruits, which means focusing more on our common ground with the Muslim world than on what divides us.

More on Al-CIAda:

“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaeda. 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.”
– Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary

– Al Qaeda Doesn’t Exist or How The US Created Al Qaeda (Documentary)

– BBC: Al-Qaeda Does Not Exist