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Is al-Zarqawi a false flag operative?

1 July 2004

If Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader credited with the beheading deaths of Nick Berg and Kim Sun-Il, did not exist it would be necessary for the United States to invent him. That may well be what the CIA has done.

What? Really? Is that credible? Would an intelligence and espionage service really murder its own people, or neutrals, or citizens of an allied country? Would it cynically kill harmless civilians with terrorist-style bombings? Would it snuff out the lives of innocents to make a political point or create a climate of fear?

The answer is Yes. For an example and we need look no further that the career of Iyad Allawi, the new, hand-picked, prime minister of Iraq. According to a New York Times report in June this year, former CIA operatives say Allawi, who ran a CIA-backed exile organization, the Iraqi National Accord (INA), organised a bombing and sabotage campaign in the early 1990s. The targets included a cinema and a school bus. At the time the CIA was trying to foment a military coup against Saddam Hussein and it is probable that the bombing campaign was intended to destabilise the regime by creating a climate of fear and instability.

In the espionage community, operations like this, for which no group claims responsibility, are known as “grey operations”. If they are attributed to a source other than that which carried them out, they’re called “black operations” and they’re carried out by “false flag” operatives.

In the “wilderness of mirrors” that is espionage, black ops have a long and seedy history. The British army employed them in their colonial war against Kenya’s nationalist Mau Mau Guerillas, where they fielded bands known as the “Pseudo Mau Mau” to infiltrate and hunt down the real nationalists. These bands were largely made up of common criminals or Mau Mau guerrillas who had been “turned”. In order to create a climate of opinion favourable to the colonial administration the Pseudo Mau Mau did not hesitate to kill missionaries and innocent villagers. The same tactics were used by the South African Apartheid regime in its struggle against the African National Congress. Sophisticated false flag operations carefully manipulate half-mad or opportunist followers of a cause.

Nowadays CNN and the CIA sees Zarqawi’s hand in dozens of events, ranging from the beheading of Nick Berg (where he supposedly wielded the knife) to the ricin poison attacks supposedly thwarted in several countries and the Madrid train bombing.

But if the CIA has the genuine spectre of Osama bin Laden to justify its agenda, why would it need Zarqawi?

Well, as a bogeyman, bin Laden was always a distinct liability. His long and well-documented connection to the CIA, the Bush family and the Texas oil industry are a major embarrassment. By contrast, Zarqawi is a shadowy figure with no worrying connections to the American establishment. He is the terrorist monster straight from Central Casting, almost tailor-made for the grim realities of the post-invasion period and the run-up to the US and Australian elections. Supposedly he is a Sunni from an impoverished Palestinian family in Jordan. To CNN, he is, conveniently, a “master of disguise” and “lone wolf”, acting independently of al-Qaeda.

Reportedly, Zarqawi is not much liked by the bulk of the Iraqi resistance, and why would he be? Everything he has ever done objectively aided the US propaganda machine. Particularly telling is his plan to advance the Islamist agenda by provoking civil war between Sunnis and Shias. The plot is set out in a rambling nine-page letter from al-Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden. It was supposedly captured by the occupation forces and was helpfully published on the Coalition Provisional Authority’s website. Sectarian strife is contrary to the policy of the real resistance leaders, either the secularist and Sunni fighters centred on Baghdad and Fallujah or Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shi’ite Madhi Army, both of which have emphasised unity in the struggle to defeat the American-lead occupation.

And there is a relentless predictability to the terrorist preparations and atrocities attributed to Zarqawi. In Colin Powell’s WMD speech at the UN, Zarqawi’s training camp (ironically located in the US-protected Kurdish enclave in Northern Iraq) was best evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, The Berg beheading came to George Bush’s aid just as the Abu Ghraib scandal broke; the Sun-Il job was perfectly timed to harden the Korean Government’s resolve to send more troops to Iraq.

Short of a guilt-driven confession by the perpetrators, it is in the nature of black operations that the truth can never be established with certainty, but history cautions us to distrust the official line, and to ask “who profits?”

Required reading:

• ‘The liberation of Baghdad is not far away’, an interview with leaders of the secularist resistance, Asia Times Online, 25 June 2004: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FF25Ak07.htm

• ‘Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?’ by Michel Chossudovsky, Centre for Global Research:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO405B.html