I have said it before and I will say it again. The United States has spent several years installing a bunch of Moslems, initially Chechens but now also from other countries, in the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. It trains them there in irregular warfare and forms them into a mobile “hit squad” which commits “terrorist atrocities” in different parts of the world when it suits US interests to intervene in those countries.
These atrocities are then blamed on “Islamic fundamentalists”, but are actually committed by these US-sponsored individuals, selected and trained for the purpose, who are not native to those countries but are sent to each place as needed. The best operatives appear everywhere; the more expendable ones are scapegoated after one job, though some of those allegedly executed for their heinous crimes actually turn up live and kicking elsewhere, and still on the US payroll.
Now we have had the Charlie Hedbo massacre in Paris. In the country which has banned the veil and burqa in public places, a gang of “Islamic fundamentalists” has slaughtered the` staff of a satirical magazine which publishes insulting cartoons about Moslems and members of every other religion.
So who are these “Islamic fundamentalists” and what is their track record? Unfortunately, it is exactly what you would expect if you have read my previous articles on related subjects.
Too many coincidences
As international journalist Tony Cartalucci has pointed out, the perpetrators of the Paris massacre had returned to France from service in Syria. There are historic links between France and Syria, but it has not been explained why “fundamentalists” offended by the conduct of a French magazine, and by implication the general situation of Moslems in France, would first go off and join the adventure in Syria before doing something about it.
Nor has it been explained why “fundamentalists” from elsewhere should descend on Paris to commit an atrocity if the satirical cartoons which allegedly prompted it had warranted a response from French Moslems. After all, there are plenty of them, we are always reminded.
George W. Bush was once rightly ridiculed for asking the French president is they had black people in France too. Yet those same voices are now making out terrorist atrocities in France to be inevitable because France has a “large” Moslem community, as if there is a symbiotic relationship between the two things.
We may never know the full history of the two brothers described as the Paris killers, the Kouachi brothers, because they have now been executed by French police. What we do know however is that there is a good reason brothers are accused of such crimes.
If two accused people are brothers, they must be implicated in any crime together and be impervious to outside influence, so the thinking runs. Even if someone else put them up to committing their alleged crimes, they must have conspired together to commit them first, simply because they are brothers.
This is the sole basis of the charge against the Tsarnaev brothers, who after attending CIA-run Moslem youth radicalisation seminars ended up in the US, accused of the Boston Marathon bombings. It has been demonstrated that they were nowhere near the bombing, surrendered to police unarmed, and the film evidence presented of the bombings themselves has been faked in several places. But the Tsarnaevs are brothers and from a Moslem country.
It is more convenient to think that foreign brothers perpetrated these bombings than US government agents furthering their own ends, even if the brothers are also effectively US agents. However such tricks are well documented in the case of the US, but not in that of the Tsarnaev or Kouachi brothers.
Silence isn’t louder than fact
We might also ask why the Kouachi brothers were killed in a supposed shoot-out with French police, which prevents them ever testifying. Many have also been asking for 50 years why Lee Harvey Oswald, surrounded by police and agents, was very conveniently shot, by a terminally ill Jack Ruby who had been waved to the location by a guard.
What we do know is that JFK was trying to expose corruption and dirty tricks in the CIA and so was his brother Robert, who also ended up mysteriously dead, from a gunshot which the alleged assassin could not have fired and was not the only one heard by those at the scene. We know that Professor David Kelly mysteriously died after repudiating what the British government said he told them about Iraq and its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
We know that those who disagree with the FBI’s version of what happened to former Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania are all dying off, one by one, after announcing they would give testimony which contradicted it. We know that the prostitute who was paid to leave the country by British politician Jeffrey Archer after claiming she had slept with him was run over by a truck when his friends eventually revealed this was a perversion of the course of justice.
We also know that these are merely the more extreme examples, and that cover-ups take many other forms. Marc Dutroux, the notorious serial killer and paedophile from Belgium, claimed to be part of a sex abuse ring involving government members. These same figures succeeded in getting the trial judge removed and putting him and anyone else who investigated the case under such threat they needed armed guards and bullet proof vehicles 24 hours a day.
Knocking off a couple of “Islamic fundamentalist terrorists” would hardly be a big issue, if any similar investigation is likely to be undertaken into who they really were and why they did what they did. It remains to be seen why they were shot in this gun battle, but not intercepted before, if the Western intelligence agencies know so much about the Islamic fundamentalist threat.
Assumptions and evidence
Whatever really happened in Paris, there are certain things we are supposed to automatically assume. One is that the US would never be behind such a thing in France because France is a friendly strategic ally. The US might murder its enemies, but not its friends.
So let us look at a few more things we know. There were French citizens in the Pankisi Gorge who were grabbed by the Americans and accused of being terrorists, when there were no armed Moslem militants in the Gorge before the US put them there under its Train and Equip Program. Many of these French citizens then ended up walking freely in the streets of Baku, apparently no longer terrorists.
We know that when Dr. Abdul Hassan, former head of the As Salam Hospital in Pankisi who had a Chechen wife, and a number of others were taken away the Georgians were given 150,000 dollars per Arab for their help in locating these “terrorists”, a good enough reason to keep this operation going. We know from the families involved that the brother of one of the kidnapped people, who had witnessed everything, was shot dead at the scene to silence him.
We know that, as reported in Izvestia, Colonel Grigol Chanturia of Georgia’s counter-intelligence department alleged to his minister that the Caucasus Foundation and the Jamestown Foundation, a neoconservative American think tank, had conducted workshops and seminars in Georgia in 2012 in order to radicalise the youth from Russia’s predominantly Moslem Northern Caucasus republics. These were the seminars attended by Tamerlan Tsarnaev. We know that these courses were approved by the Georgian government of the day in exchange for protection, which remains in place for certain of its most senior members.
We know that, for this reason, a unilateral decision was made in October 2010 to allow visa-free entry for up to 90 days for people living in the Northern Caucasus republics. Much documentation already existed at this time that Chechen fighters and other militant groups were obtaining material support from Georgia along with outside assistance. They were also inflicting five to six losses on the Russian Interior Ministry troops on a daily basis, as reported by the non-governmental organisation the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.
We know that the Paris attackers had US-type military training because such training is conducted according to manuals, and those who wrote them can spot it. We also know from eye-witnesses that they spoke French fluently.
We know that the connection between French Moslems and Pankisi was not investigated further because the Georgian National Security Agency and an NGO called Jvari (cross), amongst others, declared Pankisi a no-go zone. We know that prior to 9/11 one of the other NGOs involved, ACDI/VOCA, which was implementing a US-government funded rural credit program, was used as a mechanism to provide financial support to facilitate these operations. We know that ACEDI/VOCA ended up working in Afghanistan, placating Afghan warlords with soft loans to lower the body count.
We know that Chechen and Arab fighters found their way to the now infamous gorge and sent from there to carry out operations in the Northern Caucasus, including the Beslan School Massacre and other headline-grabbing attacks. We know from US diplomatic cables that these sought to destabilise the region and propagate a radical interpretation of Islam in this hitherto moderate region of the Russian Federation.
We know that for many years it has been alleged that France is a hotbed of such radicalism, with successive waves of headlines describing the rise of M. Le Pen’s National Front as a product of this, despite the lack of evidence of such radicalism. We also know that France is advocating removing the sanctions on Russia. A country full of Moslem radicals is a bad country which must be controlled. Changing other policies can easily be done by the back door when you are drawing attention to the need to take more desperate measures.
The Charlie Hedbo attacks were planned on the assumption that people would regard them as an Islamic fundamentalist threat to freedom of speech and democracy and ask the US cavalry to rescue them from this evil once again. People always like the most plausible alternative. But maybe this latest stunt is the one which will finally persuade more than a few commentators that we know too much, rather than too little, about what is really going on.
Henry Kamens, columnist, expert on Central Asia and Caucasus, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.