Press Action ::: Lynne Stewart Convicted of Collusion with CIA Created Terrorists

Friday, February 11, 2005

Lynne Stewart Convicted of Collusion with CIA Created Terrorists

By Kurt Nimmo

The following sends a message on the heels of Ward Churchill’s timely persecution: the attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted yesterday “of helping the mastermind [Omar Abdel-Rahman] of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing spread terror messages to his jihadi warriors around the globe,” as the New York Post characterizes it.

Here’s the message sent, via the corporate media: there are terrorists and radical, “anti-American” traitors in our midst.

Considering the history lesson below, the New York Post should have written: Lynne Stewart convicted of passing messages to the CIA.

If we know anything about Omar Abdel-Rahman, it is that he was heavily involved with the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service in Afghanistan. “He became famous traveling all over the world for five years recruiting new mujaheddin,” explains Wikipedia. “But he never hid his prime goals, which were to overthrow the governments of the US and Egypt.”

In other words, the CIA and the U.S. government had a good idea what this guy was all about but used him anyway. “One of the big problems here is that many suspects in the World Trade Center bombing were associated with the Mujahadeen,” investigator Jack Blum told a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee. “And there are components of our government that are absolutely disinterested in following that path because it leads back to people we supported in the Afghan war.”

See The CIA’s “Operation Cyclone”—Stirring the Hornet’s Nest of Islamic Unrest.

So important was Abdel-Rahman, the CIA made sure he was issued a visa and entered the United States in 1990, the country he supposedly hated. Abdel-Rahman went on to head the al-Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. Consider the following quote from The Covert Cowboys (see the Jack Blum link above and page citation):

During a conversation between a 20-year veteran FBI agent and one of his top undercover operatives, the operative asked:

“Why aren’t we going after the Sheik [Adbel Rahman]?” demanded the undercover man.

“It’s hands off,” answered the agent.

“Why?” asked the operative.

“It was no accident that the Sheik got a visa and that he’s still in the country,” replied the agent, visibly upset. “He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA.”

The agent pointed out that the Sheik had been granted a tourist visa, and later a green card, despite the fact that he was on a State Department terrorist watch-list that should have barred him from the country. He’s an untouchable, concluded the agent.?

An Egyptian by the name El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the Jewish Defense League, was connected to Adbel-Rahman and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “At his trial, Mr. Nosair claimed that the reason he had military manuals was that he was being trained by the US, not because he was intent on terrorism,” Andrew Marshall wrote for the Independent on November 1, 1998.

It is said Nosair was trained by a former Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohamed, allegedly with connections to al-Qaeda. “Yet Mr. Mohamed, it is clear from his record, was working for the US government at the time he provided the training: he was a Green Beret, part of America’s Special Forces. ... [Mohamed’s recruits, under the auspices of Operation Cyclone] received brief paramilitary training and weapons instruction in the New York area, according to evidence in earlier trials, before being sent to fight with [Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar [a major CIA asset in Afghanistan]. Even Sheikh Abdel-Rahman had, apparently, entered the US with the full knowledge of the CIA in 1990.” (For more on Hekmatyar, see Gary Leupp’s Meet Mr. Blowback: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Operative and Homicidal Thug.)

As for the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the FBI knew about the plot and allowed it to happen.

“Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer [Emad Salem, a former lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian Army] said after the blast,” Ralph Blumenthal reported for the New York Times.

But according to Paul DiRienzo, based on recorded telephone conversations between FBI informant Emad Salem and his Bureau contacts, it is possible Salem was an “agent provocateur” who allowed the bombing to go forward, at the behest of the government. In the recording, Salem admits that the bomb used in the plot was “built by supervising supervision from the Bureau and the DA and we was all informed about it and we know that the bomb start to be built.” As an informant, Salem was close to Abdel-Rahman. “Informant Salem organized the bomb plot with the ‘supervision’ of the FBI and the District Attorney as part of a classic entrapment setup,” DiRienzo speculates.

According to Ron Kuby, a partner of the late William Kunstler, who defended El Sayyid Nosair, Salem served as a classic agent provocateur. “The FBl officially acknowledges that Emad Salem began to work for them in November 1991, during the trial of Sayyid Nosair, at which Nosair was found not guilty of murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane,” Kuby told Husayn al-Kurd. “It was at that point that he infiltrated himself into the group supporting Sayyid Nosair. It was Emad Salem, as early as December of 1991, who was telling groups of these people that they should become more militant. At one point Emad Salem suggested they throw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue, at which the people listening were absolutely horrified and refused to have anything to do with him. After that, he toned down his rhetoric.” The FBI is famous for such tactics, most notably during the reign of its notorious COINTELPRO. Moreover, as Kunstler told Paul DeRienzo during a radio interview in 1993, “[Salem] also received money from Kahane Chai, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s group. Probably from a lot of other people. [Israel’s secret service,] the Mossad is not someone to exclude.”

“The New York Times reported that the evidence that Sheikh Rahman even knew of the plan to bomb the World Trade Center, and other buildings in New York, is scant,” Enver Masud writes for the Wisdom Fund. “The government’s primary witness against Sheikh Rahman is an FBI informant, Mr. Emad Salem, who confessed to lying under oath in a previous trial.”

Andreas von Bulow, former State Secretary at the Ministry Of Defense in Germany from 1976-1980, summarizes:

In the middle was the bombmaker, a former Egyptian officer. He had pulled together some Muslims for the attack. They were snuck into the country by the CIA, despite a State Department ban on their entry. At the same time, the leader of the band was an FBI informant. And he made a deal with the authorities: At the last minute, the dangerous explosive material would be replaced by a harmless powder. The FBI did not stick to the deal. The bomb exploded, so to speak, with the knowledge of the FBI. The Official story of the crime was quickly found: The criminals were evil Muslims.

Of course, in the barrage of corporate media reports and op/ed pieces over the next few days, excoriating Lynne Stewart as a terrorist collaborator, none of these shady connections and dealings—between Omar Abdel-Rahman, El Sayyid Nosair, Ali Mohamed, Emad Salem and the CIA, NSA, FBI, Egyptian intelligence and possibly Mossad—will be mentioned.

It is, I believe, no mistake that the “radical” lawyer Stewart was framed for conspiring with “evil Muslims,” as it was no mistake Ward Churchill was accused of carrying a torch for al-Qaeda, itself a CIA contrivance.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.

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