Mossad is at it again, using one of its favored propaganda outlets, DEBKAfile. “Until the middle of last week, Zuwahiri [Ayman al-Zawahiri] sheltered with the local Pashtun tribes in Bannu, a town in the northwest Pakistan tribal federation of North Waziristan. The approach of Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces caused him to switch hiding places and move to Tank or Tang, a town 120 km south of Bannu,” Mossad would have us believe. “His former sanctuary of Bannu is situated 150 km as the crow flies from the South Afghan town of Gardiz which is a hub of al Qaeda-Taliban activity. The connection between the two towns is a twisting road of 400 km through Parachinar in Pashtun tribal land. According to DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, al Qaeda and Taliban leaders do not travel from place to place by road or vehicle but on horseback by night piloted by local guides.”

In other words, either “Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces” are so inept they stupidly announce their arrival, thus frightening off their prey, or somebody told Zawahiri of their arrival up front. Is it possible this warning caught up with al-Zawahiri by way of Pakistan’s ISI? Or is it possible al-Zawahiri is nowhere near North Waziristan?

Earlier this month, the Turkish Weekly reported: On July 5, 2007, al-Sahab, the Final Cut Pro division of “al-Qaeda,” no doubt run out of a basement in Langley, Virginia, posted a 95 minute video message by al-Zawahiri entitled “The Advice of One Concerned.” It contained a “desperate call for Muslims to support the ISI,” a call that makes certain sense as the “al-Qaeda” brand is indebted to Pakistan’s ISI (and the CIA).

The first part of Al-Zawahiri’s message is an urgent call for Muslims to support the ISI and a desperate attempt to establish the ISI’s legitimacy. In this part, Al-Zawahiri attacks Muslim scholars around the Islamic world for their persistent refusal to issue fatwas that support the ISI and, worse, for the harsh criticism they aim at the ISI and its jihad endeavor. According to him, these same scholars have endorsed with their silence political entities such as the Hamas government despite the fact that it lacks important qualifications which the ISI possesses. He stresses, for example, that while the Hamas government in Gaza “connects to its other half [government] in Ramallah [only] through television circuits and while the head of the government… can move between the two parts [of his government] only after the IDF permits him and searches him,” the ISI has a coherent government and its ministers can move freely in the ISI’s self-governed territory. Yet, Muslim scholars who criticized the ISI have never questioned the Hamas government’s legitimacy.

It is perfectly understandable al-Zawahiri supports the ISI, as he was recruited by the organization and helped Osama bin Laden run Maktab al-Khidamar, an ISI-CIA front organization in the 1980s. Not unlike the vicious Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden were useful idiots, or as Marc Erikson characterized Hekmatyar, they were ISI stooges and creations. In fact, as Gerald Posner claims, citing CIA officials, Osama (and likely his inseparable sidekick, Ayman) met with Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman, Pakistani ISI’s head from 1980 to 1987, in Peshawar. Indeed, so successful was the ISI-Osama, later deemed “al-Qaeda,” working relationship that then CIA director William Casey and MI6 (and no doubt Mossad as a junior partner) gave their blessing to a massive recruitment effort of “jihadists” (then, as Reagan deemed it, “freedom fighters”) from around the world. On September 20, 2003, John Pilger wrote for the Guardian:

CIA director William Casey had given his backing to a plan put forward by Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, to recruit people from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. More than 100,000 Islamic militants were trained in Pakistan between 1986 and 1992, in camps overseen by the CIA and MI6, with the SAS training future al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in bomb-making and other black arts. Their leaders were trained at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called Operation Cyclone and continued long after the Soviets had withdrawn in 1989.

It should be noted that at this time the CIA launched a joint program with the ISI to export “militant Islam” beyond the backwaters of Afghanistan, as Ahmed Rashid notes in his book, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. It makes absolutely no sense to believe the ISI suddenly dismantled this edifice in order to simply and simple-mindedly get Osama, a goal we are told is at the top of Musharraf’s to-do list. In fact, the ISI runs Musharraf, not the other way around. Last September, the Defense Academy, a British Ministry of Defense think-tank, released a scathing report claiming “Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency had supported al-Qaeda and the Taleban and aided the Madrid and London bombers,” according to the Times Online. “We don’t like anybody advising us to dismantle ISI, least of all the [British] Ministry of Defense,” an angry Musharraf responded, understanding well who runs things in Pakistan and understanding also the ISI proclivity of snuffing out those who rub it the wrong way. At any rate, Tony Blair rushed in to play kissy face and patch things up.

“DEBKAfile’s sources disclose that the US Senate’s decision to double the bounty for bin Laden’s capture, killing or information leading to his death or capture to $50 million, was recommended by President George W. Bush after he received an urgent message from Musharraf. The Pakistani president reported his people had picked up the trail of bin Laden’s trail in their pursuit of his deputy, but the tribal chiefs with knowledge of where the elusive al Qaeda leader was hiding were holding out for an exorbitant sum for their collaboration.”

Of course, all of this is pure nonsense, as Bush, or rather the neocons behind Bush, have no interest in capturing Osama or “Zuwahiri,” the former long dead and buried and the latter probably not anywhere near North Waziristan or even Afghanistan for that matter. However, the neocons have a vested interest in running the terrorism swindle for as long as possible, maybe for another hundred years, as promised. DEBAKfile and the Mossad have their assigned role, making up Brothers Grimm stories about colorful tribal chiefs and VIP “al-Qaeda” villains on horseback in the dead of night, once again escaping justice by the whiskers of their Wahhabish beards.