ITGK

In May of 2009, respected American journalist Seymour Hersh shared a shocking revelation during an Arab TV interview. According to Hersh, Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, was a victim of a “special death squad formed by former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney” (“U.S. special squad killed Benazir”). This squad was “headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of U.S. army in Afghanistan” with Cheney using his position as chief of the Joint Special Operation Command to “clear the way for the U.S. by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA” (ibid).

Hersh has speculated that Bhutto was assassinated because she shared her opinion that Osama Bin Laden had been assassinated by Omar Saeed Sheikh (ibid). Could there be, however, a deeper reason for the Bhutto hit? These writers suggested as much during interviews on several radio shows shortly after the December 27, 2007 assassination. At that time, many in the media were blaming al Qaeda for the hit. The chief source for this claim seems to have been an “obscure Italian Web site” that alleged that its reporter had received a telephone call from Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan (Ross). During the call, al-Yazid supposedly stated: “We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen” (ibid). The Web site further contended that Ayman al Zawahri, al Qaeda's number two leader, decided it was time to do away with Bhutto back in October 2007 (ibid). While all of this sounded like a smoking gun, the claim was anything but conclusive. According to ABC's Brian Ross, U.S. intelligence officials said they could not confirm the claim of responsibility for the attack (ibid).

While al Qaeda may very well have been involved in the assassination, it should be understood that al Qaeda is merely part of a larger conspiratorial infrastructure, so it may not be accurate to place the blame solely at the doorstep of a single terrorist organization. Bhutto had vowed to do many things that would invite violent reprisal if she was re-elected prime minister. One promise that probably set off several alarm bells among the world's wealthy and powerful appeared in a September 26, 2007 report in the Times of India. According to the report, Bhutto promised to allow inspectors from the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to question A.Q. Khan, the metallurgist nuclear black marketer and father of Pakistan's “Islamic Bomb” (“Bhutto commits to letting IAEA question A.Q. Khan”).

During a visit to Washington before returning to Pakistan from her self-imposed exile, the former prime minister stated before the Middle East Institute: “While we do not agree at this stage to have any Western access to A.Q. Khan, we do believe that IAEA... would have the right to question A.Q. Khan” (ibid). Bhutto almost certainly understood that Khan's revelations to the inspectors would implicitly suggest that wealthy and powerful individuals who comprise the global oligarchical establishment were involved in the creation and shepherding of the Khan nuclear proliferation network. While she did not overtly say as much, Bhutto subtly suggested that Khan was anything but a rogue when she stated: “Many Pakistanis are cynical about whether A.Q. Khan could have done this without any official sanction” (ibid). The former prime minister was signing her own death warrant by ripping the veil off of one of the oligarchs' deepest, darkest, and closely-guarded secrets: the power elite and dark factions within the intelligence community had assisted Khan in making the world a more dangerous place.

The Khan network was created by an alliance between the American elite and the Saudi elites known as the Safari Club. Thanks to this alliance, Saudi Arabia supplanted Israel as the CIA's chief source of regional intelligence (Trento 99). For quite some time, counterintelligence chief James Angleton had maintained a “special relationship with Israel,” an association that the CIA resented (99). However, Angleton’s dismissal in 1974 precipitated the decline of the pro-Israel elements within the Agency (99). With these elements significantly weakened, the CIA was free to forge ties with the Saudi royals in 1976. At the time, the Agency had been struggling with a substantial lack of political capital. In 1973, America's ground involvement in Vietnam met with an ignominious end. This humiliating anti-climax was compounded by the fall of Saigon two years later. In addition, 1974 witnessed the startling revelations of the Watergate scandal, which generated considerable public outrage. By 1976, America’s patience with the CIA had been exhausted. The infamous "Year of Intelligence" had begun.

Voluminous instances of unlawful activity within the intelligence community eventually came under the indignant scrutiny of the Church and Pike Committees. Congress defunded all intelligence operations abroad, necessitating the Agency’s solicitation of the Saudis for badly needed funds. The Saudi royal family cemented their control over America’s intelligence financing with the formation of the Safari Club (102). The all-purpose banner of anti-communism supplied an expedient rationale for this questionable partnership.

Prince Turki synopsized the purposes and objectives of the Safari Club in a 2002 speech to the Georgetown University alumni:

"And now I will go back to the secret that I promised to tell you. In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa. In the 1970s, there were still some countries in Africa that were coming out of colonialism, among them Mozambique, Angola, and I think Djibouti. The main concern of everybody was that the spread of Communism was taking place while the main country that would oppose Communism was tied up. Congress had literally paralyzed the work not only of the U.S. intelligence community but of its foreign service as well. And so the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe at the time when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don't know. I am not saying it because I look to tell secrets, but because the time has gone and many of the actors are gone as well." (Qutd. in Trento 102)

Exploiting the threat of communism was commonplace within the dialectical climate of the Cold War. Conflict invariably gives rise to security discourses. In turn, security discourses are dominated by fear. When the politics of fear become the order of the day, concepts such as civil liberty and the rule of law are automatically subordinated to security concerns. Such circumstances tend to engender contempt toward democratic processes and, eventually, contrarians are portrayed as enemies of the State. More and more power becomes concentrated within the State, an entity that is already susceptible to the harmful influences of indifferent political and technical elites. Naturally, such a state of affairs would prove advantageous to America’s ruling class, who continually promoted their own variety of socialism as an alternative to communism. Thus, the Western elite had a vested interest in maintaining the dialectical climate of the Cold War. The Safari Club, which embodied the coalition between American oligarchs and the Saudi royal family, was instrumental in realizing this goal.

In 1978, Islamic fighters, which were supported by the Safari Club, initiated a campaign of agitation that would ultimately incite the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (167). The Safari Club’s Islamic fighters began conducting a series of cross-border raids into Soviet territory (167). Eventually, the Soviet Union was ensnared in the Afghan War. The quagmire that followed allowed the power elite to realize two major objectives that would yield significant long-term dividends.

The first of these was the creation of enemies for future Hegelian activism. In the name of fighting communism, the Islamic people could be radicalized with a violent form of their religion. The blowback that stemmed from this radicalization campaign would provide the power elite with a socially and political expedient adversary in the forthcoming “War on Terror,” which really amounted to little more than a dialectical ruse. This conflict would facilitate militaristic campaigns abroad and the dismantling of civil liberties domestically under the Patriot Act.

The second objective realized by the Afghan War was the maintenance of the ongoing dialectical rivalry between East and West. America had already experienced Vietnam. Now, in the true spirit of Hegelian reciprocity, the Soviets had to be given a Vietnam of their own. This trap had been laid by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. Brzezinski admitted as much in an interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur: