by StarmanSkye » Sun Apr 16, 2006 12:16 am
Origin of the name 'Al Qaeda' -- From my readings, it seems most likely the name was assigned after-the-fact to label Muslim charities, organizations and individuals that were loosely linked to the politics of repression and resistance, including members of Muslim Brotherhood and Mujahadeen fighters and Afghan/Soviet War veterans and 'terrorists'. I don't recall having heard the law-suit origin but it fits the same idea of label given 'to' Bin Laden et al., not one that people supposedly within it actually used themselves. I recall reading that the Power Of Nightmares confirms al qaeda referred to the CIA's DATA base of counterintel/terrorist sources, assets and suspects. As Bodansky cited below believes, the name resulted at least in part on the US and west needing to contextualize 'the enemy' -- to market the concept before the public. The same thing can be seen with Osama and Zarqawi -- prepackaged bad-guys whose newscast image/soundbites we can be conditioned to revile and gnash our teeth to. Quaint -- in the best tradition of psychological warfare.<br><br>And yeah -- it IS a damn shame we can't ask Robin Cook.<br>Starman<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,779530,00.html">books.guardian.co.uk/revi...30,00.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>--excerpt--<br>But other reasons why al-Qaida might be so called are no less mysterious. After all, communiques issued by Bin Laden and his associates never use the name. Instead they refer to themselves as the "World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders", the "Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places" and so on.<br><br>The first use of al-Qaida in western media was in 1996 in an American newspaper report which identified it as another name of the Islamic Salvation Foundation, one of Bin Laden's jihadi charities. The term only came into general usage after the group's bombing of the US embassies in East Africa in 1998, when the FBI and CIA fingered it as an umbrella organisation for various projects of Bin Laden and his associates - many of which grew out of ideas originally hatched by Abdullah Azzam, who'd been killed by a car-bomb in Peshawar in 1989.<br><br>The network grew exponentially. By the time Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan in 1996, his roster of jihadis had been computerised. Flying back to Afghanistan on a C-130 transport plane, he is said to have had with him, along with his wives and 150 supporters, a laptop computer containing the names of the thousands of fighters and activists who would help him further expand his struggle against the west. This qaida ma'lumat, this "information base", seems a very plausible source of the name.<br><br>Dr Saad al-Fagih, a Saudi dissident and former Afghan mujahideen, thinks the term is over-used: "Well I really laugh when I hear the FBI talking about al-Qaida as an organisation of Bin Laden." Al-Qaida was just a service for relatives of jihadis, he said, speaking to the American PBS show Frontline. "In 1988 he [Bin Laden] noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organised and arranged for proper documentation."<br><br>Fascinatingly, the acclaimed biography of Bin Laden by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, hardly mentions the name al-Qaida. Written before September 11, it does so only to emphasise that al-Qaida is the wrong name altogether: "A lot of money is being spent on a rapidly expanding web of Islamist charities and social services, including the recently maligned al-Qaida. Bin Laden's first charity, al-Qaida, never amounted to more than a loose umbrella framework for supporting like-minded individuals and their causes. In the aftermath of the 1998 bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, al-Qaida has been portrayed in the west as a cohesive terrorist organisation, but it is not."<br><br>There's no doubt that the name came to prominence in part because America needed to conceptualise its enemy. This is certainly what Bodansky thinks now. "In the aftermath of September 11," he says, "both governments and the media in the west had to identify an entity we should hate and fight against."<br><br>Rohan Gunaratna, research fellow at the centre for the study of terrorism and political violence at the University of St Andrews, takes a different view. In an important recent book on al-Qaida, he argues that the name came from political theory, citing the concept of al-Qaida al-Sulbah (the solid base) formulated in an essay by Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden's intellectual mentor. The solid base provided a platform, Gunaratna writes, for the "sole purpose of creating societies founded on the strictest Islamic principles".<br><br>Al-Qaida al-Sulbah mixes a type of revolutionary vanguardism, borrowed from European political philosophy, with Islamic martyrdom: it's the pioneering vanguard that must, in Azzam's phrase, after "a long period of training and hatching", be prepared to "jump into the fire". And there may be another borrowing: the essay reads like nothing so much as Hari Seldon's plans for his foundation. Perhaps it was Azzam, after all, who read Asimov.<br><br>**<br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/04/12/the_al_qaeda_myth.php">www.tompaine.com/articles...a_myth.php</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br>Tom Porteous on the 'Myth of AlQaeda:<br>--quote--<br>The role of the alleged "Al Qaeda mastermind in Iraq," Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, we are now told, was cynically misrepresented and exaggerated by the U.S. military's propaganda units in an effort to discredit and divide the Iraqi insurgency and to provide a retrospective justification for the Iraq war by suggesting a link between Iraq and 9/11.<br><br>Wherever in the world Al Qaeda crops up, its appearance has often been uncannily convenient for the local authorities—dictators, warlords, occupation forces and elected governments alike. And often the precise nature of the Al Qaeda connection turns out, on close examination, to be tenuous or non-existent. But by that time the message has gone out and sunk in: "Al Qaeda was here".<br><br>It's almost certain that as the United States ratchets up the pressure on Iran in the coming months the non-issue of Tehran 's "links" with Al Qaeda will come to the fore. In fact the groundwork is already being laid. Blair, no less, said ominously in a speech last month that although "the conventional view is that Iran is hostile to Al Qaeda: we know from our own history of conflict that, under the pressure of battle, alliances shift and change." So as the confrontation with Iran builds, watch out for leaked reports from anonymous security officials about dastardly Iranian-Al Qaeda conspiracies. <br>Plucked from the database: 'Al-Qaeda' boogeymen all share a common past, hidden in plain sight<br>Source: Awoken Research Group<br>URL Source: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://valis.cjb.cc/">valis.cjb.cc/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Abdullah Azzam fought for the CIA in Afghanistan. <br><br>Abu Abdel Aziz 'Barbaros' fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia. <br><br>Osama bin Laden fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Gulbaddin Hekmatyar fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Muhammad Jamal Khalifa fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi fought for the CIA in Bosnia <br><br>Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his three brothers, Zahed, Abed, and Aref fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Ayman Zawahiri (Version 1.0) <br><br>Ayman Zawahiri's brother fought for the CIA in Kosovo. <br><br>Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also fought for the CIA in Bosnia <br><br>Hambali fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Wali Khan fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Ramzi Ahmed Yousef fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Mohammed Haydar Zammar from Hamburg, fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Abu Omar, aka Hassan Osama Nasr fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Abu Hamza al-Masri fought for the CIA in Afghanistan & Bosnia <br><br>Ahmed Said Khadr fought for the CIA in Afghanistan <br><br>Jose Padilla & Mohamed Hesham Youssef fought for the CIA in Kosovo <br><br>To be continued...<br>[Research by BlackJade]<br>[Note: It wasn't us, but 'Able Danger' that found the Atta connection to a CIA network in Brooklyn] <br><br>Also see: The CIA's Jihad - New Yorker Magazine - 03/17/95 <br><br>*<br>"Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially-induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear." -- General Douglas MacArthur <br><br> <p></p><i></i>