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AFRICOM Eyes the Islamic Maghreb Kurt
Nimmo
And why exactly is the Pentagon warning us about “al-Qaeda” terrorists that “probably could not attack the U.S. homeland”? As usual, the answer is simple and predictable enough. “The U.S. focus on the group comes as the Bush administration finalizes plans to create a new military command in Africa, called AFRICOM,” part and parcel of the neocon vision of Pax Americana.
According to the “experts,” GSPC is led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, “a former [Algerian] soldier who followed the familiar route for radical young Muslims and went to fight in Afghanistan,” the BBC reported in 2003. In other words, Mokhtar Belmokhtar was recruited by the CIA. “Between 1982 and 1992, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 43 Islamic countries in the Middle East, North and East Africa, Central Asia and the Far East would pass their baptism under fire with the Afghan mujahideen,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. “Tens of thousands more foreign Muslim radicals came to study in the hundreds of new madrassas [religious schools] that Zia’s military government began to fund in Pakistan and along the Afghan border. Eventually more than 100,000 Muslim radicals were to have direct contact with Pakistan and Afghanistan and be influenced by the jihad [against the USSR],” a pet project of Zbigniew Brzezinski and later CIA director William Casey. James Ingalls summarizes:
“Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam,” explains Michel Chossudovsky. “While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.” And no doubt, as well, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, described by locals in Algeria “as a kind of modern day Robin Hood,” a former officer in the Algerian army and veteran of the CIA-ISI war in Afghanistan, does not realize he is working for the CIA and the Pentagon, providing a pretext for the establishment of AFRICOM. “The goal is to prevent another Afghanistan,” Lieutenant Commander Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Boston Globe last December. On the other hand, the idea may be to create another Afghanistan, an incubator for engineered terrorism, this time in the Islamic Maghreb. For an unknown number of impoverished African villagers, death by way of AC-130H Spectre gunship is now a certainty.
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It should now be considered standard operating procedure—in
order for the Pentagon to set-up shop in far-flung nations, a threat from
“al-Qaeda” must be present. Thus we learn “U.S. counterterrorism
officials are paying renewed attention to an increasingly dangerous incubator
for extremism: a swath of northern and sub-Saharan West Africa, from the
Atlantic coast of Morocco and Mauritania to the harsh deserts of Chad,”
according to 
