Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's Blog, page 5

Is MI5 foiling terror plots of its own hatching?

This weekend I had a short, sharp piece published in the Independent on Sunday (in print and online at Indy Voices) which argued that the banned Al Muhajiroun is still incubating terrorism on UK soil - but that the group has had a very murky connection to Britain's security services, and may still do so. Check it out here - 'Britain should prosecute terrorism suspects, not play shady games of geopolitics'.



Today, I'm elaborating on one dimension of that piece here in the wake of the stream of revelations concerning the role of MI5 in allegedly tracking/harassing the Woolwich attackers. This piece has more detail - on the evidence of Al Muhajiroun's unequivocal terror connections, and the credible evidence of its relationship to Britain's security services. It includes little known but credible choice info from an MI5 source and Bakri himself confirming the relationship:














Allegations broadcast last night on BBC Newsnight, based on a letter
addressed to Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), claim that
Woolwich suspect Michael "Mujahid" Adebolajo had been tortured by
Kenyan authorities "at the behest of British intelligence."




The allegations compound questions already raised about why
MI5 failed to prevent the horrifying attack despite both suspects having appeared
on MI5
and MI6 "intelligence watch lists"; with Adebolajo himself having
"featured in several
counter-terrorist investigations" for the "last eight years".
Various reports suggest he had been high
on MI5's priority for the last three years, and even harassed to join up as
an informant six months ago.




Defending criticisms of MI5, ISC chairman Sir
Malcolm Rifkind told the BBC that the security service's record in the last
few years had been "hugely impressive", as proven by the litany of
plots foiled and successful terrorism prosecutions.




But the central role of the banned al-Qaeda linked group
formerly known as Al Muhajiroun in almost every major UK terror plot -
including Woolwich - demonstrates the murkiness of MI5's relationship with the
banned group.




One
in five terrorist convictions in the UK for more than a decade were for
people who were either members of or had links to Al Muhajiroun.
himself admitted to knowing Adebolajo as someone who "attended our
meetings and my lectures." Adebolajo was a regular at Al Muhajiroun's
Woolwich high street dawah
(propagation) stall, was "tutored" by Al-Muhajiroun founding chair
Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed himself, and had attended the group's
meetings between
2005 and 2011.




Despite proscription, Al Muhajiroun has continued to
function with impunity in new incarnations, most recently under the banner of Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq - run under the
tutelage of British-born Anjem Choudary.




Al Muhajiroun's intelligence connections started in 1996
when Omar Bakri founded the group. According to John
Loftus, a former US Army Intelligence Officer and Justice Department
prosecutor, three senior Al Muhajiroun figures at the time - Bakri, Abu Hamza,
and Haroon Rashid Aswat - had been recruited by MI6 that year to facilitate Islamist activities in the
Balkans. The objective was geopolitical expansion - destabilising former
Soviet republics, sidelining Russia and paving the way for the Trans-Balkan
oil pipeline protected by incoming NATO 'peacekeeping' bases.




On 10th February 1998, Bakri and Choudary issued a "fatwa"
declaring "a full scale war of Jihad" on the US, Britain, and "non-Muslim
governments... which will be the responsibility of every Muslim around the
world to participate in."




In 2000, Bakri admitted to training British Muslims to learn
"firearms and explosives use, surveillance and other skills" and
"would be expected to join a jihad"
abroad. He also boasted: "The British government knows who we are. MI5
has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public
immunity. There is nothing left. You can label us ... put us behind bars,
but it's not going to work."




In the summer preceding 9/11, the FBI flagged up the unusual
presence of Al Muhajiroun activists at Arizona flight schools, many with
terror connections, including one described as a close bin Laden associate.




Labour Party MP Andrew
Dismore told Parliament about a month after 9/11 that Bakri's private
security firm, Sakina
Security Services, sends hundreds of Britons "overseas for jihad
training with live arms and ammunition", including to camps in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. Though Sakina was raided by police and shut down, Bakri and
Hamza were not even arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.




In 2003, two Al Muhajiroun members carried out a suicide
bombing in Tel Aviv. Lead 7/7 bomber Mohamed Sidique Khan, an Al Muhajiroun
member who had been friends
with the Tel Aviv bombers, had even travelled
to Israel weeks before that attack. Khan later underwent explosives training
in a camp set up by Al
Muhajiroun's British and American members in Pakistan.




A year before 7/7, Bakri warned of a "well-organised
group" linked to al-Qaeda "on the verge of launching a big
operation" against London. Months before the attacks, Bakri told his
followers in internet lectures: "I believe the whole of
Britain has become Dar al-Harb (land
of war). The kuffar [non-believer] has no sanctity for their own life or
property." Muslims are "obliged" to "join the jihad... wherever
you are", and suicide bombings are permitted because "Al-Qaeda... have
the emir."




But around the same time, the Wall Street Journal's
Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Ron
Suskind was told by an MI5 official that the cleric: 

"had helped MI5 on
several of its investigations." 

Bakri confirmed the same in an interview
with Suskind years later from Tripoli, Lebanon, where he now resides. As
Suskind wrote in his book, The
Way of the World:

"Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for
it with information he passed to the police... It's a fabric of subtle
interlocking needs: the [British authorities] need be in a backchannel
conversation with someone working the steam valve of Muslim anger; Bakri needs
health insurance."

Bakri maintains regular
contact with his British followers from Lebanon. Why would MI5 and MI6 retain
the services of someone so dangerous given the overwhelming evidence of his centrality
to violent radicalisation? Is MI5, through Al Muhajiroun, hatching many of the
plots it lays claim to successfully foiling - as the FBI
has been doing in the US?




It is the ISC's job to find out whether this strategy has
repeatedly backfired - the committee must ask MI5 probing questions not simply
about pre-Woolwich intelligence "defects",
but about the security service's longstanding relationship with the extremist
network incubating terror on UK soil.






Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq
Ahmed is an international security expert who writes for The Guardian at
his Earth Insight
blog. The author of The
London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by
the Coroner's Inquiry into 7/7 and the 9/11 Commission.

Exclusive - Woolwich suspect tortured "at behest of British intelligence", Parliamentary Intelligence Committee is told: Police's arrest of witness claiming Woolwich attacker was radicalised by torture, sexual abuse and harassment was "ordered by MI5"

A letter to the UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security
Committee by a childhood friend of one of the Woolwich attackers claims that
the suspect was subjected to "systematic torture and sexual abuse" by
Kenyan troops on behalf of Britain's security services. 




The letter - exclusive excerpts of which are quoted below - is authored by Ibrahim Hassan, otherwise known as
"Abu Nusaybah", who was interviewed by Richard Watson on BBC Newsnight claiming that
MI5 had been harassing Woolwich suspect Michael "Mujahid" Adebolajo
to join the agency as an informant six months ago. Hassan was arrested by
Metropolitan Police under the Terrorism Act 2000 immediately after his BBC
interview, and is currently in custody at Southwark Police Station.




A copy of this letter was obtained by this author today, photographs of which are posted at the end of this report, which also contains an exclusive interview with Ibrahim Hassan's lawyer with previously unknown details of Adebolajo's alleged ordeal.








Addressed to chairman of the committee Sir
Malcolm Rifkind, and prepared with the assistance of his solicitors, Hassan's letter insists on his innocence of involvement in terrorism activities, and his condemnation of
Adebolajo's "shocking acts." Arguing that it is in "the public
interest that everything that can be done to prevent such atrocities in the
future should be the government's top priority", Hassan says that he
believes "two fundamental factors" explain this behaviour:

"... the first factor was the systematic torture and
sexual abuse he was subjected to by Kenyan troops which he believed was at the
behest of British intelligence. Michael was told by his captors that this
action by them was at the behest of UK authorities. He could not forget or
forgive them for this connivance in this brutal treatment of him, when all he
was trying to do was build a new life for himself outside of the UK."

After his return to the UK, Hassan writes that Adebolajo
"informed me that he was subject to further harassment and intimidation by
the security services in order to pressure him into working for them as an agent."
The letter implores the committee "to investigate any connection between
the UK and Kenyan authorities in the mistreatment of Michael Adebolajo whilst
in their hands. I am witness to the fact that the Michael I knew ceased to
exist after his treatment in Kenya."




The letter also claims that counter terrorism police
officers did not deny that the arrest was ordered by MI5. It points out that: 

"at a hearing video link on the 26th May 2013 with Westminster Magistrates
Court where the police sought permission from the court to extend my time in
custody, my barrister asked if my arrest was ordered by the intelligence
services [and] the police refused to deny this possibility." 

Hassan adds
that he believes his arrest "was ordered by the intelligence services
because I made this information public."




Adebolajo was one of seven men arrested
by Kenyan authorities during a trip to the country in November 2010. Kenyan
police at the time accused the men of travelling to Somalia to join the
al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist group al-Shabaab. His family and friends claimed
that he had been detained without charge and tortured before his return to
Britain.




The claims have been corroborated by a London-based human
rights organisation, Cage Prisoners. Chairman of the group, Moazzem Begg, said
the day after Hassan's arrest:

"Is it a coincidence that Abu Nusaybah was arrested
yesterday at the BBC studios right after he gave an interview which described
the MI5 harassment and torture in Kenya - which British intelligence knew about
and quite possibly was complicit in - of Michael Adebolajo?"

Begg confirmed that Adebolajo had "approached us around
the time about it and we referred him to lawyers as a result."




Now Begg's confirmation is supported with further details by Ibrahim Hassan's
lawyer, Mohammed Akunjee of Soni & Kaur Solicitors in an exclusive interview with this author.




Akunjee said that his client told him that Michael Adebolajo
had been tortured in Kenya under the orders of Britain's security services. He
added that this key claim put forth by Hassan and recorded during his BBC
Newsnight interview was inexplicably not aired on the first programme. Instead,
Newsnight waited until the release of Hassan's letter to air the recording today,
28th May.




Akunjee said that, "Abu Nusayba told me that 6 months
ago Michael Adebolajo had turned up at his house distraught and explained to
him that he was being harassed and hounded by MI5 officers.




"They had been good friends for many years - since
before each of them had converted to Islam - which is why Adebolajo confided in
him. Adebolajo told him that during his trip to Kenya to undertake an Islamic
studies course, he had been arrested by Kenyan authorities on the pretext that
he was trying to collaborate with al Shabaab.




"He said that after being detained in a holding cell
for hours, a number of Kenyan security officers turned up at his cell and beat
him severely all over to interrogate him although he protested his innocence.




"When Adebolajo demanded to have contact with the
British embassy, the Kenyan officers laughed and told him, 'Who do you think
asked us to do this to you?'




"One of the officers then stripped him and grabbed his
penis. He told him, 'If you don't talk, I'm going to fuck you.' As Adebolajo
was innocent, there was nothing he could say. According to my client, Adebolajo
said to him that the Kenyan officers then proceeded to do 'unimaginable things
to him which he couldn't bear talking about'."




"Eventually, Adebolajo was put on trial in a Kenyan
court, but the case collapsed due to lack of evidence. Back in the UK, his
family lobbied the Foreign Office and eventually the public pressure forced the
British authorities into action and the Kenyan authorities were compelled to
free him."




However, according to Akunjee, as soon as Adebolajo arrived
back in the UK, "he was greeted by MI5 officers who interrogated him at
the airport."




Although Hassan is a former member of the banned extremist group
Al Muhajiroun, Akunjee points out that it is because his client shared similar
experiences to his friend Michael Adebolajo that the latter felt comfortable
with confiding in him.




Akunjee also said: 

"I'm a criminal defence lawyer and
have to assess the cogency of evidence and information on a daily basis. I can
say that Ibrahim Hassan's testimony on this issue appears plausible - he had no
motive to lie, in fact, he knew that coming on record with this information
could backfire for him due to his background. I think his testimony is
credible."

On Newsnight's earlier decision to not air allegations on the
crucial link between the security services and Adebolajo's torture, Akunjee
said: 

"The specific allegations that my client related suggesting that the
UK security services had authorised Kenyan security officers to torture him on
behalf of British intelligence was not broadcast by Newsnight, even though it
was part of the recorded interview." 

Despite Newsnight's broadcast of that excerpt today, questions remain as to what prompted the editors to avoid doing so earlier.




Akunjee further raised questions as to why British
police chose to arrest Ibrahim Hassan under the Terrorism Act after the
Newsnight interview, rather than beforehand.

"They had ample opportunity to arrest him days before
if they believed he had some connection to the Woolwich attack. My client is
concerned that the authorities didn't want this damning testimony to be
broadcast, and when it was, to ensure that further revelations would not be
publicly released. My client believes he is being punished not for terrorism,
but for airing unsavoury and embarrassing allegations about the security services."

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq
Ahmed is an investigative journalist and international security expert who
writes for The Guardian at his Earth Insight
blog. He is the author of The
London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by
the Coroner's Inquiry into 7/7 and the 9/11 Commission.

Whistleblower: Al Qaeda Chief was US Asset - Sunday Times Exposé of Pentagon Terror Ties "Pulled" After U.S. State Department Interference... and the Mark Grossman Connection

Last Friday, Ceasefire magazine published my exclusive, in-depth investigative report exposing the Pentagon's covert sponsorship of al Qaeda terrorists from the late 1990s through to 9/11 - including sponsoring Ayman al Zawahiri himself. 





My report is based on interviews with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, whose extraordinary case has been covered by the likes of Vanity Fair and American Conservative , as well as with Sunday Times journalists who corroborated her claims and spoke of an investigative series they were working on in 2008, based on her revelations, which was "pulled" inexplicably after US government pressure.




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The report has gone well and truly viral, collecting over 4,000 Facebook shares, 500 Tweets, and being reposted all over the web. The report was also republished by the highly respected US investigative news magazine, Counterpunch . 




But there's more...




The versions published so far have been edited to avoid naming certain names. Below, exclusively for this blog, I publish the original version identifying the "State Department official" fingered by Sibel in the past - Marc Grossman, a senior government official who has worked for both the Bush and Obama administrations before moving into the private sector/lobbying sector.




And we've just published part 1 of my exclusive conversation with Sibel over at the Crisis Podcast series, courtesy of Dean Puckett, who has spliced together a wonderful and eclectic show with interventions from me, Dean - of course Sibel - interspersed with sound and music.




Enjoy...







A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the
U.S. government's support for international terrorist networks and organised
crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary
lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as a fabulist and
fabricator. But now comes word that some of her most serious allegations were
confirmed by a major European newspaper only to be squashed at the request of
the U.S. government.




In a recent  book,
Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describe how the Pentagon, CIA and
State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001.Her
memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel
Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials
with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms
smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.




In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds
claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's
deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular  meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku,
Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001,
as part of an operation known as 'Gladio B'. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well
as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported
on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate
in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.




According to two Sunday
Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related
revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of
a four-part investigative series that was supposed to run in 2008. The Times journalists described how the
story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed "interest
groups", which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State
Department.




Shooting the
Messenger




Described by the American
Civil Liberties Union as the "most gagged person in the United States
of America" Edmonds studied  criminal
justice, psychology and public policy at  George Washington and George Mason
universities. Two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, her fluency in
Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani earned her an FBI contract at the Washington DC
field office. She was tasked with translating highly classified intelligence
from operations against terrorism suspects in and outside the U.S.. In the
course of her work, she became privy to evidence that U.S. military and
intelligence agencies were collaborating with Islamist militants affiliated
with al-Qaeda, the very forces blamed for the 9/11 attacks - and that officials
in the FBI were covering up the evidence. When Edmonds complained to her
superiors, her family was threatened by one of the subjects of her complaint, and
she was fired. Her accusations of espionage against her FBI colleagues were eventually
investigated by the Justice Department's
Office of the Inspector General, which did not give details about the
allegations as they remained classified.




Although no final conclusions about the espionage
allegations were reached, the Justice Department concluded
that many of Edmonds' accusations "were supported, that the FBI did not
take them seriously enough and that her allegations were, in fact, the most
significant factor in the FBI's decision to terminate her services."




When she attempted to go public with her story in 2002, and
again in 2004, the U.S. government silenced Edmonds by invoking a legal
precedent known as "state secrets privilege" - a near limitless power
to quash a lawsuit
based solely on the government's claim that evidence or testimony could divulge
information that might undermine "national security." Under this
doctrine, the government sought to retroactively
classify basic information concerning Edmonds's case already in the public
record, including, according to the New
York Times , "what languages Ms. Edmonds translated, what types of
cases she handled, and what employees she worked with, officials said. Even
routine and widely disseminated information -- like where she worked -- is now
classified."




Although certainly not the first invocation of "state
secrets privilege", since the Edmonds case the precedent has been used repeatedly in the post-9/11
era under both the Bush and Obama administrations to shield
the U.S. government from court scrutiny of rendition, torture, warrantless
wiretapping, as well as the President's claimed
war powers.




Other intelligence experts agree that Edmonds had stumbled
upon a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the American judicial system. In her
memoirs, she recounts that FBI Special Agent Gilbert Graham, who also worked in
the Washington field office on counterintelligence operations, told her over a
coffee how he "ran background checks on federal judges" in the
"early nineties for the bureau... If we came up with shit - skeletons in
their closets - the Justice Department kept it in their pantry to be used
against them in the future or to get them to do what they want in certain cases
- cases like yours." A redacted version of Graham's
classified protected disclosure to the Justice Department regarding these
allegations, released in 2007, refers to the FBI's "abuse of
authority" by conducting illegal wiretapping to obtain information on U.S.
public officials.




Journalists Speak Out




Five years ago, Edmonds revealed to the Sunday
Times that an unidentified senior U.S. State Department official was on
the payroll of Turkish agents in Washington, passing on nuclear and military
secrets. "He was aiding foreign operatives against U.S. interests by
passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department
but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political
objectives", Edmonds told the paper. She reported coming across this
information when
listening to suppressed phone calls recorded by FBI surveillance, marked by
her colleague Melek Can Dickerson as "not pertinent".

In recent interviews with this author, Edmonds and the two Times journalists confirmed the identity
of the official to be Marc Grossman,  then U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (1994-1997). Both
reporters involved in the Times
investigation clarified that Edmonds' allegations against Grossman had been
corroborated by multiple other U.S. intelligence sources, including from the
FBI.




Grossman went onto become Assistant Secretary of State for
European Affairs (1997-2000), then served as Under Secretary of State for Political
Affairs under the Bush administration (2001-2005). His most recent political
appointment was as Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan
(2011-2012). He is currently Vice President of the Washington DC lobbying firm,
The Cohen Group.




Grossman could not be reached for comment, although his
colleague Bob Tyrer, Co-President of the Cohen Group, responded on his behalf
describing Edmonds' allegations as "reckless... absurd, malicious and
false." He also told this author: "You should be ashamed of any role
you might play in further disseminating them."

Edmonds' allegations, however, have been supported by
others, such as John M. Cole, former FBI Counterintelligence and
Counterespionage Manager who worked for 18 years in that Division. In a
statement to American Conservative
magazine, he referred to "the FBI's decade-long investigation" of
Grossman, which "ultimately was buried and covered up."




Cole has also called
for a Special Counsel investigation into what he describes as a deliberate
cover-up of Edmonds' case: "All I know is that everything that Sibel is
stating is true. I read her file. Everything she stated is, in fact, accurate...
Everybody at headquarters level at the bureau knew that what she was saying was
extremely accurate. I know they didn't want her to go out and speak about it at
all, and I know they were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing
quiet, because they didn't want Sibel to come out."




Incubating Terror




In the Sunday
Times exposé, Edmonds described a parallel organisation in Israel
cooperating with the Turks on illegal weapons sales and technology transfers.
Between them, Israel and Turkey operated a range of front companies incorporated
in the U.S. with active "moles in sensitive military and nuclear
institutions", supported by U.S. officials, in order to sell secrets to the
highest bidder. One of the  buyers was
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) - which often used its Turkish allies,
according to the Times, "as a
conduit... because they were less likely to attract suspicion." The Pakistani
operation was, the paper reported, 
"led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief" from 1999
to 2001, when the agency helped train, supply and coordinate the religious
zealots who formed the Afghan Taliban and gave sanctuary to their Arab allies
brought together in the coalition named al-Qaeda. Ahmad, as the Times noted, "was accused [by the
FBI] of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11
hijackers, immediately before the attacks."




According to Indian
intelligence officials, they had assisted the FBI in "tracing and
establishing" the financial trail between the General and the chief
hijacker. The discovery was, they allege, the real reason behind the General's
sudden retirement in October 2001.




The Pakistani daily, The News , reported on 10th September
2001 that the ISI chief held several "mysterious meetings at the Pentagon
and National Security Council" that week, including CIA director George
Tenet – but "the most important meeting was with Mark [sic] Grossman, U.S.
Under Secretary for Political Affairs."

Edmonds raises the question of whether Grossman's alleged
liaisons with an espionage network overseen by Ahmad, and the FBI's suppression
of related intelligence, played a role in facilitating the attacks.




"Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives
were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or
somehow aided the attacks", reported the Sunday Times. The paper related that according to Edmonds, the
hitherto unnamed State Department official received a call from a foreign agent
under FBI surveillance asking for help to "get them out of the U.S. because
we can't afford for them to spill the beans." The official - now confirmed
to be Grossman by Edmonds and the Times
journalists - promised "he would 'take care of it'."




Edmonds told this author that high-level corruption compromised
the ability of the U.S. intelligence community to pursue ongoing investigations
of those planning the 9/11 attacks. "It was precisely those militants that
were incubated by some of America's key allies", she said.




Corruption helped guarantee Congressional silence when that
incubation strategy backfired in the form of 9/11. "Both Republican and
Democratic representatives in the House and Senate came up in FBI
counterintelligence investigations for taking bribes from foreign agents",
she said. A Vanity
Fair investigation in 2005 had identified at least one prominent
Republican congressman - then speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert - as being named
repeatedly by Turkish targets of FBI surveillance as the recipient of tens of
thousands of dollars, to be paid in small cheques to his campaign funds. The
funds were in return for political influence.




Al-Qaeda: Enemy or
Asset?




In her interview, Edmonds  insisted that after its initial exposé on
Grossman, the Times' investigation had
gone beyond such previous revelations, and was preparing to disclose her most
startling accusations. Among these, Edmonds described how the CIA and the
Pentagon had been running a series of covert operations supporting Islamist
militant networks linked to Osama bin Laden right up to 9/11, in Central Asia,
the Balkans and the Caucasus.




While it is widely recognised
that the CIA sponsored bin Laden's networks in Afghanistan during the Cold War,
U.S. government officials deny any such ties
existed. Others claim these
ties were real, but were severed after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989.




But according to Edmonds, this narrative is false. "Not
just bin Laden, but several senior 'bin Ladens' were transported by U.S.
intelligence back and forth to the region in the late 1990s through to 2001",
she told this author, "including Ayman al-Zawahiri" - Osama bin
Laden's right-hand-man who has taken over as al-Qaeda's top leader.




"In the late 1990s, all the way up to 9/11, al-Zawahiri
and other mujahideen operatives were meeting regularly with senior U.S.
officials in the U.S. embassy in Baku to plan the Pentagon's Balkan operations
with the mujahideen," said Edmonds. "We had support for these
operations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. oversaw and directed
them. They were being run from a secret section of the Pentagon with its own
office" - the name, Edmonds did not disclose. She clarified, "the FBI
counterintelligence investigation which was tracking these targets, along with
their links to U.S. officials, was known as 'Gladio B', and was kickstarted in
1997. It so happens that Major Douglas Dickerson" - the husband of her FBI
co-worker Melek whom she accused of espionage - "specifically directed the
Pentagon's 'Gladio' operations in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan at this time."





In testimony
under oath, Edmonds has previously confirmed that Major Doug Dickerson
worked for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the weapons
procurement logistics division on Turkey and Central Asia, and with the
Office of Special Plans (OSP) overseeing policy in Central Asia - first under Marc
Grossman, and later under Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
from 2001 to 2005.




Gladio B




In her March interview with this author, Edmonds said that
the Pentagon operations with Islamists were an "extension" of an
original 'Gladio' programme uncovered in the 1970s in Italy, part of an EU-wide NATO covert
operation that began as early as the 1940s.




As Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser records in his seminal
book, NATO's Secret Armies, an
official Italian
parliamentary inquiry confirmed that British MI6 and the CIA had established
a network of secret "stay-behind" paramilitary armies, staffed by
fascist and Nazi collaborators. The covert armies carried out terrorist attacks
throughout Western Europe, officially blamed on Communists in what Italian
military intelligence called the 'strategy of tension'.




"You had to attack civilians, the people, women,
children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political
game" explained Gladio operative Vincenzo Vinciguerra
during his  trial in 1984. "The
reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people... to turn to
the State to ask for greater security."




While the reality of Gladio's existence in Europe is a matter of
historical record, Edmonds contends the same strategy was adopted by the
Pentagon in the 1990s in a new theatre of operations, namely, Asia.
"Instead of using neo-Nazis, they used mujahideen working under various
bin Ladens, as well as al-Zawahiri", she said.

The last publicly known Gladio meeting occurred in NATO's
Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) in Brussels in 1990. While Italy was a focal
point for the older European operations, Edmonds said that Turkey and
Azerbaijan served as the main conduits for a completely new, different set of
operations in Asia using veterans of the anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan,
the so-called "Afghan Arabs" that had been trained by al-Qaeda.




These new Pentagon-led operations were codenamed 'Gladio B'
by FBI counterintelligence: "In 1997, NATO asked [Egyptian President] Hosni
Mubarak to release from prison Islamist militants affiliated to Ayman al-Zawahiri
[whose role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat led to Mubarak’s ascension].
They were flown under U.S. orders to Turkey for [training and use in] operations
by the Pentagon", she said.

Edmonds' allegations find some independent corroboration in
the public record. The Wall
Street Journal refers to a nebulous agreement between Mubarak and
"the operational wing of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was then headed by
Ayman al-Zawahiri...  Many of that
group's fighters embraced a cease-fire with the government of former President
Hosni Mubarak in 1997."




Youssef
Bodansky, former Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare, cited U.S. intelligence sources in an article for Defense and Foreign Affairs: Strategic
Policy, confirming "discussions between the Egyptian terrorist leader
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and an Arab-American known to have been both an emissary
of the CIA and the U.S. Government." He referred to an
"offer" made to al-Zawahiri in November 1997 on behalf of U.S.
intelligence, granting his Islamists a free hand in Egypt as long as they lent
support to U.S. forces in the Balkans. In 1998, Al Zawahiri's brother, Muhammed,
led an elite unit of the Kosovo Liberation Army against Serbs during the Kosovo
conflict - he reportedly had direct contact with NATO leadership.




"This is why", Edmonds continued in her interview,
"even though the FBI routinely monitored the communications of the
diplomatic arms of all countries, only four countries were exempt from this
protocol - the UK, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Belgium - the seat of NATO. No other
country - not even allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia, were exempt. This is
because these four countries were integral to the Pentagon's so-called Gladio B
operations."




Edmonds did not speculate on the objectives of the Pentagon's
'Gladio B' operations, but she highlights the following as possibilities: projecting
U.S. power in the former Soviet sphere of influence to access previously
untapped strategic energy and mineral reserves for U.S. and European companies;
pushing back Russian and Chinese power; and expanding the scope of lucrative
criminal activities, particularly illegal arms and drugs trafficking.




Terrorism finance expert Loretta Napoleoni
estimates the total value of this criminal economy to be about $1.5 trillion
annually, the bulk of which "flows into Western economies, where it gets
recycled in the U.S. and in Europe" as a "vital element of the cash
flow of these economies."




It is no coincidence then that the opium trade, Edmonds told
this author, has grown rapidly under the tutelage of NATO in Afghanistan: "I
know for a fact that NATO planes routinely shipped heroin to Belgium, where
they then made their way into Europe and to the UK. They also shipped heroin to
distribution centres in Chicago and New Jersey. FBI counterintelligence and DEA
(Drug Enforcement Agency) operations had acquired evidence of this drug
trafficking in its surveillance of a wide range of targets, including officials
in the Pentagon, CIA and State Department. As part of this surveillance, the
role of the Dickersons - with the support of Grossman - in facilitating
drug-trafficking, came up. It was clear from this evidence that the whole
funnel of drugs, money and terror in Central Asia was directed, before 9/11, by
Grossman."




The evidence for this funnel, according to Edmonds, remains
classified in the form of FBI counterintelligence surveillance records she was
asked to translate. Although this alleged evidence has never made it to court
due to the U.S. government's exertion of 'state secret privilege', she was able
to testify in detail concerning her allegations against Grossman and others
under oath in
2009. She also aired these allegations in an interview with former CIA
official Philip Giraldi in American
Conservative magazine the same year.




Censorship




The Sunday Times investigation was to break much of
the details into the open. "We'd spoken to several current and active
Pentagon officials confirming the existence of U.S. operations sponsoring
mujahideen networks in Central Asia from the 1990s to 2001," said one Times source. "Those mujahideen
networks were intertwined with a whole range of criminal enterprises, including
drugs and guns. The Pentagon officials corroborated Edmonds' allegations
against Grossman, and I'd also interviewed an MI6 officer who confirmed that
the U.S. was running these operations sponsoring mujahideen in that period."





But according to Edmonds, citing the investigative team at
the paper, the last two articles in the series were spiked under U.S. State
Department pressure. She recalled being told at the time by journalists leading
the Times investigation that the
newspaper's editor had decided to squash the story after receiving calls from
officials at the U.S. embassy in London.




A journalist with the Sunday
Times' investigative unit told this author he had interviewed former
Special Agent in Charge, Dennis Saccher, who had moved to the FBI's Colorado
office. Saccher reportedly confirmed the veracity of Edmonds' allegations of
espionage, including the FBI's investigation of Grossman, telling him that
Edmonds' story "should have been front page news" because it was
"a scandal bigger than Watergate." The same journalist confirmed that
after interviewing Saccher at his home, the newspaper was contacted by the U.S.
State Department. "The U.S. embassy in London called the editor and tried
to ward him off. We were told that we weren't permitted to approach Saccher or
any other active FBI agents directly, but could only go through the FBI's press
office - that if we tried to speak to Saccher or anyone else employed by the
FBI directly, that would be illegal. Of course, it isn't, but that's what we
were told. I think this was a veiled threat."




Saccher's comments to the journalist never made it to press.




A lead reporter on the series at the Times told this author that the investigation based on Edmonds'
information was supposed to have four parts, but was inexplicably dropped.
"The story was pulled half-way, suddenly, without any warning", the
journalist said. "I wasn't party to the editorial decision to drop the
story, but there was a belief in the office amongst several journalists who
were part of the Insight investigative unit that the decision was made under
pressure from the U.S. State Department, because the story might cause a diplomatic
incident."




Although the journalist was unaware of where this belief
came from - and was not informed of the U.S. embassy's contact with the paper's
editor which the other journalist was privy to - he acknowledged that
self-censorship influenced by unspecified "interest groups" was a
possible explanation. "The way the story was dropped was unusual, but the
belief amongst my colleagues this happened under political pressure is
plausible." He cryptically described an "editorial mechanism, linked
to the paper but not formally part of it, which could however exert control on
stories when necessary, linked to certain interests." When asked which
interests, the journalist said, "I can't say. I can't talk about
that."




Edmonds described how due to the U.S. government's efforts
to silence her, she had no option left except to write her story down. The
resultant book, Classified
Woman , had to be submitted to an FBI panel for review. By law, the
bureau was required to make a decision on what could be disclosed  or redacted within 30 days.




Instead, about a year later, Edmonds' lawyer received a
letter from the FBI informing them that the agency was still reviewing the
book, and prohibiting her from publishing it: "The matters Ms. Edmonds writes about involve
many equities, some of which may implicate information that is classified... Approval
of the manuscripts by the FBI will include incorporation of all changes
required by the FBI. Until then, Ms. Edmonds does not have approval to publish
her manuscripts which includes showing them to editors, literary agents,
publishers, reviewers, or anyone else. At this point, Ms. Edmonds remains
obligated not to disclose or publish the manuscript in any manner."




The block was another example, Edmonds said, "of the abuse
of 'national security' to conceal evidence of criminality." She said that
this forced her to release the book herself in March 2012, as no publisher
would risk taking it on.



Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a bestselling author, investigative
journalist and international security scholar who blogs at www.nafeezahmed.com.
He writes for The Guardian on the
geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises via his Earth Insight
column. Sibel Edmonds memoirs, Classified
Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, is available from all good online
booksellers.

Planetary Extinction, Endless War... and Fatherhood

Amidst extended paternity leave, sleepless nights, changing nappies, and school runs, I've only just about managed to sustain my minimal objective of a regular writing output of about an article a week. But this week I had something special in preparation to sink your teeth into.



So I had two hugely important stories out over the weekend about quite different (but always interrelated) issues.



My latest Guardian post, 'Obama's Arctic strategy sets off a climate time bomb' is about the new US National Strategy for the Arctic Region published by the White House just over a week ago.  My piece analyses the strategy document in-depth, and concludes that President Obama's new Arctic strategy, driven by narrow economic and energy interests, would accelerate the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, driving catastrophic climate change, and guaranteeing an uninhabitable planet before the end of the century (and probably far earlier). The implications of this strategy and its implementation, therefore, should not be underestimated. Massive grassroots mobilisation is necessary to somehow bring pressure to bear on the White House to reverse the suicidal trajectory of its Arctic strategy.




I also had an exclusive investigative report that I'd been working on quietly over the last four months or so come out Friday night in the quarterly British magazine, Ceasefire - 'Why was a Sunday Times report on US government ties to al-Qaeda chief spiked?' The latter is an explosive, incendiary in-depth story (if I don't say so myself) based on interviews with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, interviews with Sunday Times journalists working on a story based on her revelations (that was inexplicably and pre-emptively pulled), and analysis of relevant public record data. The main theme? The notorious terrorist mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri - current "emir" of al-Qaeda and deputy/right-hand man to Osama bin Laden while he was alive - was a US intelligence asset in the late 1990s all the way through to 9/11 as part of a Pentagon operation in Central Asia known as "Gladio B". 




Enmeshed in this terror nexus was a vast underground criminal network subsidised by the highest echelons of the US national security apparatus, and linked with illegal arms and drug trafficking networks, working inexorably to undermine and render inoperative security for American citizens - all in the name of the power and profit of a corrupt minority.




The story is huge because it flies in the face of conventional wisdom and points to serious questions about the failures and policies that may have facilitated not just the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but subsequent terrorist attacks around the world, including the Boston bombings. 




The piece was a long time coming - Ceasefire was not the first place I pitched to. I'd done the rounds of a whole range of mainstream and alternative news outlets and each one, for one reason or another, ultimately opted out of running the piece. 




But it is testament to the courage and credibility of Ceasefire that they took the piece on without blinking an eye. Please do congratulate them if you get a chance for doing so.  




We've already had massive success, despite no support from mainstream outlets. The story is currently going viral - it has racked up over 3,500 Facebook shares and 420 Tweets in a matter of 48 hours. It's even been retweeted to over 1 million Twitter accounts by Anonymous through their @YourAnonNews handle. 




In the coming weeks, we'll be following up with more multimedia materials exploring elements of the story. Sibel Edmonds herself is posting updates and explanatory thoughts via her website, and plans to produce a video report or few on the story. I've also got my creative director at IPRD, Dean Puckett, working on the audio files of my interviews with Sibel Edmonds to splice together a podcast or two. 




We need all your support to get the word out about this story. Because people have a right to know what our governments are doing in our names.




The one thing that keeps me going as I write on these issues which are in many ways so deeply shocking and worrying is... well, three things. My two little girls, and the latest addition to my family, my baby boy, born last month. Being a father and a husband has taught me, really taught me, what life's about, at its core. When I hold my son, so fragile, so tiny and utterly dependent, and indeed completely trusting - even while I myself am physically exhausted - I realise that at the core of what makes human life special is love, compassion, self-sacrifice; realising that the source of one's happiness is nothing less than love for the Other. And then you realise, that the separation between your self and the Other is, itself, merely an ideological artifact, that in fact we are all, truly, in this together, parts of a whole, one family.




So I stare into the face of the Abyss with eyes wide open, my heart free from fear, bearing a grin that some might mistake for madness, fists emboldened by the love that flows through veins wrought from the struggle, because what else is there to do?

Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict

There's much confusion about what's going on Syria. Debates continue to rage about whether to be pro-intervention, or anti-intervention, whether to support the rebels, or be against the rebels, with some even suggesting that Assad is not really committing terrible crimes.





I've written at length about the deep politics of the Syria conflict for Prospect magazine in the UK and the Institute for Policy Studies' Foreign Policy In Focus  in the US. 




My latest Guardian piece goes deeper - to look at how the convergence of energy, environmental and economic crises combined with political repression and sectarianism have exploded, culminating in the outbreak of a civil war that is, in fact, a war by proxy for control of the region's strategic energy corridors.





Peak oil, climate change and pipeline geopolitics driving Syria conflict

Root-cause environmental and energy factors sparking violence will continue to destabilise Arab world without urgent reforms



The civil war in Syria has been devastating, generating a death toll fast approaching 100,000, while uprooting millions of civilians from their homes.

But as the US and Russia signed an unprecedented accord on Wednesday in search of a political solution to an increasingly intractable conflict, its underlying causes in a fatal convergence of energy, climate and economic factors remain little understood.











The UN high commissioner for human rights has offered a conservative under-estimate of the death toll at about 70,000 people - accompanied by over 1 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries and more than 2 million people internally displaced. According to anotherindependent study, about 79% of confirmed victims of violence in Syria have been civilians.

Although opposition fighters have been implicated in tremendous atrocities, international observers universally confirm the vast bulk of the increasingly sectarian violence to be the responsibility of Bashir al-Assad's regime.

Yet the conflict is fast taking on international dimensions, withunconfirmed allegations that rebel forces might have used chemical weapons following hot on the heels of US-backed Israeli air strikes on Syrian military targets last weekend.

But the US, Israel and other external powers are hardly honest brokers. Behind the facade of humanitarian concern, familiar interests are at stake. Three months ago, Iraq gave the greenlight for the signing of a framework agreement for construction of pipelines to transport natural gas from Iran's South Pars field - which it shares with Qatar - across Iraq, to Syria.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the pipelines was signed in July last year - just as Syria's civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo - but the negotiations go back further to 2010. The pipeline, which could be extended to Lebanon and Europe, would potentially solidify Iran's position as a formidable global player.

The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan is a "direct slap in the face" to Qatar's plans for a countervailing pipeline running from Qatar's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, also with a view to supply European markets.

The difference is that the pipeline would bypass Russia.

Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have received covert support from Washington in the funneling of arms to the most virulent Islamist elements of the rebel movement, while Russia and Iran have supplied arms to Assad.

Israel also has a direct interest in countering the Iran-brokered pipeline. In 2003, just a month after the commencement of the Iraq War, US and Israeli government sources told The Guardian of plans to "build a pipeline to siphon oil from newly conquered Iraq to Israel" bypassing Syria.

The basis for the plan, known as the Haifa project, goes back to a 1975 MoU signed by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "whereby the US would guarantee Israel's oil reserves and energy supply in times of crisis." As late as 2007, US and Israeli government officials were in discussion on costs and contingencies for the Iraq-Israel pipeline project.

Syria's dash for gas has been spurred by its rapidly declining oil revenues, driven by the peak of its conventional oil production in 1996. Even before the war, the country's rate of oil production had plummeted by nearly half, from a peak of just under 610,000 barrels per day (bpd) to approximately 385,000 bpd in 2010.

Since the war, production has dropped further still, once again by about half, as the rebels have taken control of key oil producing areas.

Faced with dwindling profits from oil exports and a fiscal deficit, the government was forced to slash fuel subsidies in May 2008 - which at the time consumed 15% of GDP. The price of petrol tripled overnight, fueling pressure on food prices.

The crunch came in the context of an intensifying and increasingly regular drought cycle linked to climate change. Between 2002 and 2008, the country's total water resources dropped by half through both overuse and waste.

Once self-sufficient in wheat, Syria has become increasingly dependent on increasingly costly grain imports, which rose by 1m tonnes in 2011-12, then rose again by nearly 30% to about 4m in 2012-13. The drought ravaged Syria's farmlands, led to several crop failures, and drove hundreds of thousands of people from predominantly Sunni rural areas into coastal cities traditionally dominated by the Alawite minority.

The exodus inflamed sectarian tensions rooted in Assad's longstanding favouritism of his Alawite sect – many members of which are relatives and tribal allies – over the Sunni majority.

Since 2001 in particular, Syrian politics was increasingly repressive even by regional standards, while Assad's focus on IMF-backed market reform escalated unemployment and inequality. The new economic policies undermined the rural Sunni poor while expanding the regime-linked private sector through a web of corrupt, government-backed joint ventures that empowered the Alawite military elite and a parasitic business aristocracy.

Then from 2010 to 2011, the price of wheat doubled - fueled by a combination of extreme weather events linked to climate change, oil price spikes and intensified speculation on food commodities - impacting on Syrian wheat imports. Assad's inability to maintain subsidies due to rapidly declining oil revenues worsened the situation.

The food price hikes triggered the protests that evolved into armed rebellion, in response to Assad's indiscriminate violence against demonstrators. The rural town of Dara'a, hit by five prior years of drought and water scarcity with little relief from the government, was a focal point for the 2011 protests.

The origins of Syria's 'war by proxy' are therefore unmistakeable - the result of converging climate, oil and debt crises within a politically repressive state, the conflict's future continues to be at the mercy of rival foreign geopolitical interests in dominating the energy corridors of the Middle East and North Africa.

But whoever wins this New Great Game, the Syrian people will end up losing.

As other oil exporters in the region approach production limits, and as climate change continues to wreak havoc in the world's food basket regions, policy makers should remember that without deep-seated transformation of the region's political and economic structures, Syria's plight today may well offer a taste of things to come.

White House warned on imminent Arctic death spiral

My latest Guardian piece went up last week. The article reports on a little-known White House meeting with leading Arctic scientists on the rapid loss of summer sea ice, including the prospect that the ice might disappear within 2 years. Organisers of the meeting included US Pentagon and Homeland Security Department officials - strange huh?



Indeed. To get some context on what might be bugging the White House, I dig out some recent planning documents from the US Department of Defense and Homeland Security.




The article has been a big hit. It's triggered reports on HuffPost Live, Deutsche Welle, Vice Magazine, the Center for Climate & Security, The Atlantic, among many others, and was the number one most popular environment article over the long weekend.




Check out the piece below:





White House warned on imminent Arctic ice death spiral

National security officials worried by rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice overlook threat of permanent global food shortages

Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years.

The meeting is being organised by a US brains trust on the Arctic consisting of Nasa's acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon.



This is the latest indication that US officials are increasingly concerned about the international and domestic security implications of climate change.

Senior scientists advising the US government at the meeting include 10 Arctic specialists, including marine scientist Prof Carlos Duarte, director of the Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia.

"The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train."

Duarte is lead author of a paper published last year in Nature Climate Change documenting how "tipping elements" in the Arctic ecosystems leading to "abrupt changes" that would dramatically impact "the global earth system" had "already started up". Duarte and his team concluded: "We are facing the first clear evidence of dangerous climate change."



New research suggests that the Arctic summer sea ice loss is linked to extreme weather. Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francispoints to the phenomenon of "Arctic amplification", where:

"The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather."

Extreme weather events over the last few years apparently driven by the accelerating Arctic melt process - including unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the US and Russia, along with snowstorms and cold weather in northern Europe – have undermined harvests, dramatically impacting global food production and contributing to civil unrest.

US national security officials have taken an increasing interest in the destabilising impact of climate change. In February this year, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released its new Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which noted that global warming will have:

"... significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water."

The effects of climate change may:

"Act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world... [and] may also lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response, both within the United States and overseas … DoD will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on its facilities, infrastructure, training and testing activities, and military capabilities."

The primary goal of adaptation is to ensure that the US armed forces are "better prepared to effectively respond to climate change" as it happens, and "to ensure continued mission success" in military operations - rather than to prevent or mitigate climate change.

While the DoD is also concerned about the Arctic, the focus is less on risks than on opportunities:

"The Department is developing cooperative partnerships with interagency and international Arctic stakeholders to collaboratively address future opportunities and potential challenges inherent in the projected opening of the Arctic."

Arctic "stakeholders" include US, Russian, Canadian, Norwegian and Danish energy firms, which are scrambling to exploit the northern polar region's untapped natural wealth. The region is estimated to hold a quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas reserves, sparking concerted efforts by these countries to expand their Arctic military presence.

The US Homeland Security Department's Climate Change Roadmapreleased last year raised similar issues, warning that climate change "could directly affect the Nation's critical infrastructure", as well as aggravating "conditions that could enable terrorist activity, violence, and mass migration".

On the Arctic, the report highlights the imperative to protect US resource interests by increasing regional military penetration:

"Melting sea ice in the Arctic may lead to new opportunities for shipping, tourism, and resource exploration, but the increase in human activity may require a significant increase in operational capabilities in the region in order to safeguard lawful trade and travel and to prevent exploitation of new routes for smuggling and trafficking."

A public statement in response to news of the White House's Arctic briefing released on Tuesday by the UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) - a group of international climate scientists – called on governments to recognise that the dramatic loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic would amplify the types of extreme weather events that have already affected the world's major food basket regions, undermining global food production for the foreseeable future with serious consequences for international security.

The group, which includes among its founding members leading Arctic specialists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, stated that:

"The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue."

The AMEG statement adds that governments should consider geoengineering techniques - large-scale technological interventions in the climate system - to "cool the Arctic and save the sea ice" in order to avert catastrophe. Critics point out, however, that untested geoengineering technologies could have damaging unintended impacts on ecosystems, and that a regulatory framework is needed before embarking on major projects.

Big Oil, Burma and the Genocide Against the Rohingya: My new Guardian column on the environment blog network - Earth Insight

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that I've been contracted to The Guardian to write my own column, Earth Insight, on the newspaper's pioneering environment website. As you can imagine, this is pretty amazing and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to raise awareness of the key issues I write about to a mainstream audience.





The Guardian is the world's third most popular newspaper website, with a daily readership of 4.6 million people worldwide, and a readership base which just keeps getting larger every year (by about 13 per cent). So one could hardly wish for a better mainstream platform.




Via my Earth Insight column, I'll be doing exclusive reporting, muckraking commentary, and detailed transdisciplinary analysis, informed by my systemic and holistic approach to environmental security issues, to track the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy, and economic crises and their social consequences.




So bookmark that page and keep coming back!




My first article went up last Friday. I hope you find it useful:




The dirty fossil fuel secret behind Burma's democratic fairytale





South-east Asian country's untapped natural wealth is being opened up, regardless of the environmental and human costs









New evidence has emerged that the systematic violence against ethnic Rohingya in Burma - "described as genocidal by some experts" - is being actively supported by state agencies. But the violence's links to the country's ambitions to rapidly expand fossil fuel production, at massive cost to local populations and to the environment, have been largely overlooked.









Over 125,000 ethnic Rohingya have been forcibly displaced since waves of violence swept across Burma's Arakan state last year, continuing until now, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) latest sobering report. The "ethnic cleansing" campaign against Arakan's Muslim minority, although instigated largely by Buddhist monks rallying local mobs, has been the product of "extensive state involvement and planning", according to HRW's UK director David Mepham.

The group found:

"All of the state security forces [in Arakan] are implicated in failing to prevent atrocities or directly participating in them, including local police, Lon Thein riot police, the inter-agency border control force called Nasaka, and the army and navy."

Burma's Rohingya minority has resided in the country for decades, but been formally denied citizenship by the government, subjected instead to forced labour, arbitrary land confiscations, and routine discrimination. Although the latest violence raises urgent questions about the integrity of Burma's ostensible democratic reform process, the west has refused to allow the campaign against the Rohingyas to interfere with efforts to integrate the regime into global markets.

The last two years has seen first the US, then the UK and the EU, lift decades of economic sanctions with a view to "open a new chapter" in relations with Burma.

Nestled strategically between India and China, Burma is rich in fossil fuels and other mineral resources, including oil, gas, gold, timber and jade. In recent months, even as genocidal violence has escalated, the country has been courted by world leaders, such as President Barack Obama, British foreign secretary William Hague, and European Commission president José Manuel Barroso.

As Forbes reports , thanks to Burma's "vast, untapped reserves of oil and natural gas" – estimated at between 11 trillion and 23 trillion cubic feet – "and with sanctions over and a world thirsty for new sources of energy, Western multinationals are eager to sign deals."

But foreign companies must partner with local companies to be able to bid. This condition has spurred Myanmar's crony capitalist elite of fewer than 20 families – many of whom built their business empires on the back of state favours from the former military junta – to rebrand themselves as honest brokers for western investors looking for their next regional venture.

Attempting to consolidate their privileged position in a highly unequal but resource-rich economy, Burma's business families are making renewed efforts to capitalise on the resource rush, highlighting their philanthropic activities, and forging new ties with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Foreign investment is currently dominated by Chinese, Thai and Indian firms, who operated relatively unfazed by western sanctions, but American, British and French multinationals such as Chevron, BP, Shell, and Total are jockeying to make up for lost time.

Yet the scramble to open up Burma for business has played a direct role in inflaming community tensions. One of the most prominent culprits is the Shwe Gas Project led by South Korean and Indian companies, to export natural gas via pipeline from Arakan state to China's Yunnan province. The 2,800km overland pipeline is slated to become operational this year.

The project plans to produce 500 million cubic feet (mcfd) of gas per day for 30 years, supplying 400 mcfd to China, and the remaining 100 mcfd to factories owned by the Burmese government, military and associated business elites.

The losers from this venture are the Burmese people and environment. An extensive report by the Shwe Gas Movement (SGM), a Burmese community-based human rights network, documented the destruction of local fishing and farming industries, including confiscation of thousands of acres of land to "clear areas for the pipeline and associated infrastructure", from 2010 to 2011. Tens of thousands have been left jobless, with little or no compensation or employment opportunities.

The pipeline also cuts through the Arakan Yoma forest ecosystems of the Western Mountain Range, part of the Eastern Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, contributing to soil erosion and endangering species. One third of coral reefs north of Kyauk Phyu town have already been seriously damaged, undermining fish and marine life, and local fishing. Freshwater rivers and waterways have been dredged for sand and gravel for construction purposes, and are set to become dumping grounds for toxic materials.

In December 2011, the pipeline project sparked widespread angeracross Arakan's cities and rural areas, as local people demanded provision of 24 hour electricity. Ranked the second most impoverished state of Burma by the UN Development Programme, approximately 3 million people living in Arakan have no access to public electricity, with just a few major cities able to access only five to six hours of electricity per day, provided by private companies at extortionate prices of 400-600 Kyat per unit (compared to 25 Kyat per unit in Rangoon). Overall, Burma is by far the poorest country in Southeast Asia, with a third of the population living in poverty.

The eruption of ethnic violence across Arakan against ethnic Rohingyas six months later in 2012 was therefore most likely triggered by the simmering tensions wrought by escalating economic marginalisation. On the one hand, Arakan's deepening economic crisis, fuelled by the state-backed pipeline project, laid the groundwork for an increase in xenophobia and racism toward the Rohingya. On the other, Burmese state agencies appear to have deliberately fostered the ethnic cleansing campaign to divert populist anger away from the devastating impact of the pipeline project, and instead toward the most easy and vulnerable target to hand.

Even as violence against the Rohingya escalates, conflict has also broken out along the pipeline route between Burmese security forces and local armed resistance groups linked to the Kachin state, where people have faced arbitrary arrest, torture, forced labour, rape and sexual violence at the hands of the Burma Army.

The plight of these different groups underscores that the fairytale of Burma's rosy democratic transition is exactly that - a fairytale.

But lured by the promise of windfall profits, it is a fairytale convenient for competing global powers eager to capitalise on the country's untapped natural wealth, regardless of the environmental and human costs.

Uprising: The Struggle for the Global Commons

To be published soon in the Spring 2013 edition of Strike! Magazine - a gutsy, innovative newsmagazine which you can buy for just 1 quid.















The last half decade has seen the persistence of social
protests in various forms, including civil disobedience and mass demonstrations.
From the Occupy movement across the Western world, to the Arab Spring in the
Middle East and North Africa; from riots in European capitals, to the current
protests in Cyprus: uprisings have become a regular feature of life.




With the world reeling under the impact of banking
collapses, austerity, environmental crisis, energy woes and rocketing food
prices, it's no wonder that people everywhere are rising up demanding change.




But at the heart of these disparate uprisings is a single
global struggle - a struggle between the people and profit, for access to the
planet's precious land, water, energy, raw materials and resources: a struggle
for the global commons.




Over three hundred years ago, the struggle kicked off in a
major way when the seeds
of English capitalism were planted amidst mass evictions of peasants from
public lands. Formerly landed peasants, who were compelled by threat of force
to pay tribute, a percentage of their produce, to local lords, now ended up as
a new, landless proletariat. They had no choice but to sell their labour power
for wages to the lords who now owned and controlled what was once their land.
This process of enclosure gradually enforced a new social condition - the
dispossession of people from access to the sources, means and technologies of production
- that was and remains the fundamental basis of modern capitalism.












But in 1649, Gerrard Winstanley
gathered together fifty odd supporters to challenge the new order with a
radical message - to make "the Earth a common treasury for all…
not one lording over another, but all looking upon each other as
equals in the creation".  Occupying vacant and public lands
in Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Kent, and Northamptonshire,
Winstanley's rag-tag movement of "Diggers" uprooted the centralisation
of economic power with a call for equal access for all, growing their own food,
and distributing it to the public for free - until local landowners hired thugs
and mercenaries to force them out. Although the Diggers turned to the
government for support, they were ignored and forced to disband.












But the struggle for the 'global commons' had only just
begun. Fast forward to the 21st century, and despite the wonders of modern
industry and global communications, in many ways little has changed. In
countless communities around the world, in the UK, in Spain, in Greece, in
Africa, Latin America and India, the spirit of the "Diggers" lives on
as poor people, farmers, workers, and peasants find themselves making a last
stand between the common land they own collectively, and global corporations in
pursuit of ever greater profits.




Ultimately what we are facing is a struggle between two
visions of the world. Global civilizational crises of climate change, energy
depletion, food scarcity, economic meltdown, and violent conflict, are interconnected
symptoms of a protracted collapse process of the broken, neoliberal model. As
this model increasingly crumbles under the weight of its own sustainability,
the battle for new, more viable alternatives intensifies.




At stake is a new, emerging
paradigm of civilization based on a vision of a global
commons for all - new only in the sense that such a notion has never been
practiced before on a global scale, for it is rooted in ideas and norms that
traditional peoples all over the world have implemented in different ways.




Currently, at the core of our current civilizational model
is a dramatic inequality in access to the Earth's resources, coupled with an
ideology which sees those resources as nothing more than a playing field for a
minority of members of the human species to accumulate material wealth without
limits. The vast majority of the world's resources - not just monetary wealth,
but land, resources and raw materials - is owned and controlled by a tiny
minority of states, monarchs, aristocratic families, banks and corporations.




It is no accident that the Queen
of England - arguably the harbinger of contemporary global capitalism
before its supersession by the United States - is the world's largest landlord,
owning about 6.6 billion acres of land. That is one-sixth of the Earth's land
surface. It gets worse. 1,318
corporations own 80 per cent of the world's wealth, and out of that, a tiny
interlocking nexus of 147 'super corporations' own half of that.












And as civilizational crises deepen, the response of this
nexus of power has been to attempt to increasingly centralise its control of
the Earth's last remaining untapped resources. Indeed, in the last half decade
alone, land grabs largely in the less developed countries have
accelerated dramatically. In 2008-2009, about 22 million hectares were
subject to acquisition according to the World Bank, rising to about 80 million
in 2011. Overall, the last decade has seen a total of 203 million hectares
acquired or being negotiated. This process, driven by varying combinations of
political patronage, violence, and market forces, is leading to the escalating
displacement of poor people from commonly owned lands, and the transfer of
their land into centralised ownership of foreign corporations and investors.












What is driving this process? Short answer: a civilization
in overshoot. Across the board, as resources
are depleting, scarcity is increasing, and prices are rising. Since 2005,
the world food price index has doubled, and despite stabilising this year, remain
at record levels. Simultaneously, the global oil index in the same period has
roughly tripled, and despite promises about shale gas and fracking, even the
International Energy Agency concedes that the age of cheap oil is well and
truly over. Other commodities are also rocketing in value, from metals, to
timber, to chemicals, with one study by Inverto AG noting a "systematic
shortage" leading to "supply bottlenecks", leading companies to
raise prices, passing costs onto consumers.




Unfortunately, even those who claim to be at the vanguard of
responding to these crises can be part of the problem. Chris Martenson, for
instance - a former executive of the giant pharmaceutical firm Pfizer and an ex
Vice President at US defence conglomerate, Science Applications International
Corporation (SAIC) - who now devotes all his time to writing presciently about
the "triple crisis" of environmental, energy and economic collapse,
has very few
meaningful solutions. 




Instead of advocating systemic transformation, or
challenging capitalism in its current form, he advocates - effectively - a
strengthening of the most regressive neoliberal principles: Individuals should
seek "resilience" by investing what
remains of their wealth in high value stocks and shares - largely commodities
like farming land, and others which we have seen are rocketing in price - based
on Martenson's strategic investment advice. This sort of 'elitist survivalism'
is ultimately part of the problem: encouraging those with capital to maximise
their control of the world's wealth, as crises kick in, in order to remain safe
amidst imminent civilizational collapse. Meanwhile, the rest of the world's
population can go to hell in a handbasket.









As the persistence of uprisings proves, of course, it won't
work - people will not simply lay back while power seals its destruction of the
Earth.




And civilization is unlikely to collapse so imminently. Despite
that, while things will get worse before they get better, the trends we are
seeing today are illustrative of a fundamental and often forgotten reality: that the 21st
century signals the unequivocal demise of the carbon age. The failure
to come to terms with this fact and its implications is symptomatic of the
delusion of our current era. Whatever happens, by the end of this century (if
not far earlier), our  civilization in
its current form will not, cannot
exist. We will either have overshot, drastically and fatally, with horrifying
consequences for humanity, or we will have transitioned to something far more
in parity with our environment - or somewhere in between.




That is why, the choices we make now, the struggles we
choose to partake in now, will be critical in determining the course of our
future. We do not have the option of pessimism and fatalism. There's enough of that
to go around. Our task is to work together to co-create viable visions for what
could be, and to start building those visions now, from the ground up. 

Robi Chowdhury and the Muslim Youth Helpline

Last
night, someone called Robi Chowdhury posted a blog
purporting to "expose" me for calling him a
"spineless, shameless twat" on Twitter, and associating him with the criminals
who hacked and harassed my wife, Akeela Ahmed, out of her job as CEO of
MYH. 




Chowdhury
is a close associate of the criminals - former staff members of MYH (all of whom
have been expunged from the charity) - who launched a sustained campaign of bullying
and harassment against Akeela last year, due to a variety of reasons, among
them, her role in protecting the charity's values of diversity (such as in the
hiring of a non-Muslim). Chowdhury himself has also been expelled from the charity.




MYH, a
charity that aims to provide emotional support to vulnerable young Muslims, was
subjected to a series of criminal attacks last year, including multiple
hackings of several senior staff, as well as public releases of the charity's
emails and confidential information in April and May. Also included in that
harassment campaign were obscene and threatening texts and phone calls to my
wife, and to several other volunteers who worked at the charity. 




In between
those hackings, Chowdhury - as he confesses proudly on his blog -was party and
signatory to a fake "petition" attributed falsely to MYH members.
This illegal document contained a series of defamatory allegations against my
wife, and made a number of illegal demands, among them her immediate sacking. The
document was also a form of blackmail, threatening to remove the Trustees if they
didn't sack Akeela. And it was sent out on a public email list including a
variety of Muslim community organisations, with deliberate intent to slander
and defame, causing Akeela, myself and our family a great deal of anxiety and distress.




Apart
from that, Chowdhury went onto harass both me and Akeela by tweeting,
facebooking and blogging the same defamatory allegations. This included
promoting the so-called "myh whistleblowers blog", which published our
home address, our personal mobile phone numbers, our personal email addresses,
as well as the personal email addresses of my father in law and his legal
adviser.




At this
point, it is clearly in the public interest to refer to an official MYH
document concerning the realities of what went on - we have not previously disclosed
this information in the public domain. Below are relevant quotations
from the MYH Annual General Meeting minutes, 14th October 2012, which Chowdhury
himself attended:






































Unfortunately,
when we attended an amazing event co-organised by our friends at The Leaf Network and Radical Middle Way, featuring Riz
Ahmed and Wajahat Ali at Rich Mix on 13th January, Chowdhury was present,
accompanied by a number of other people linked to MYH who to varying degrees
had harassed and targeted Akeela. According to Chowdhury, Akeela
"exploded" and set out to "nuke" them. Simultaneously, he
claims "I can’t remember a whole lot about what she was saying." He
then claims that after Akeela "caused a scene", they left the venue as
they were "distressed."






As the
organisers of the event will confirm, there was no "scene". The
reality is that unlike those who harassed us from a distance, Akeela went up to
them, said "Salams", then challenged them in a civilised manner about their
continued friendship with and protection of the hackers, and about their advocacy
of violence toward Akeela.




Specifically,
she told Chowdhury, "You had my number, you had my email, you were on my
facebook, you could have contacted me with any concerns at any time. Instead, you
were happy to partake in the harassment campaign conducted by your friends
against me, slandering and defaming me on twitter and your blog. I'm coming and
speaking to you face to face. This is completely the opposite of what you
did."




Chowdhury's
response was "Please, Akeela."




Akeela
said, "Please, what? You've publicly slandered me behind my back, are
friends with the hackers, and you continue to protect them. That's complicity.
And when I come and say salams to you to address my concerns directly with you,
you have nothing to say to me?"




On his
blog Chowdhury also regurgitates the long ago discredited claim that I dobbed innocent young Muslims into SO15. I have already refuted this false allegation in
my
full statement on this issue, and have publicly and wholeheartedly
acknowledged, and apologised for, whatever mistakes we did make.




The sad
truth of the matter is that a small group of very cowardly people bullied
and harassed a charity, its female CEO, some of its senior female staff members,
and some of its young volunteers, with impunity last year, to the extent of
spying on my wife's and my personal correspondence. 




Chowdhury was and is
friends with those people, and participated in the campaign against my wife by his own inadvertent admission of being party to a fake petition "led by the hackers" according to the charity's own investigation. So when
he surfaced on my twitter, I tweeted that he's a spineless, shameless twat. Sure,
I can acknowledge that it was probably an error of judgement to call him a
twat. It's not the best language - but how would you react if people were harassing your wife, and then one of them decided to twitter-stalk you?




When he contacted me via email asking me to remove that tweet, I did offer to meet him face-to-face to discuss our differences to reach an amicable resolution (he actually screenshots that email on his blog, another indication of no respect for confidentiality) - for instance, I would have been happy to remove the tweet, as long as he'd also remove all the multiple defamatory tweets, postings and blogs he'd put up about myself and Akeela. He didn't bother replying to that last email of mine - so as he himself now admits on his blog, he simply wasn't interested in meeting to resolve things amicably.

Overcoming the Crisis of Civilization: Five Revolutions

Last November I did a talk at a seminar hosted by The Crisis Forum, at St Ethelburga's Centre for Peace and Reconciliation (Climate Change and Violence Workshop 7: Avoiding climate change violence: What is to be done?
).

I spoke not just about the latest state of the evidence on environmental and energy crises, along with their inherent interrelationships with food and economic crises; I also addressed the increasing problem of state militarisation as an inevitable outcome of the current, failed business-as-usual approach to dealing with these crises.

In the latter part of the talk, I spoke about the five tentative "revolutions" or "transformations" which are taking place in disparate parts of the world, albeit only in embryonic form, and the immense potential they hold for an alternative, sustainable civilizational paradigm. 
The talk was filmed, and recently put up on video. You can watch it here:

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, 'Overcoming the Crisis of Civilisation' from Crisis Forum on Vimeo.