Pepe Escobar: What is al-Qaeda really up to?

[unhappycamper]

What is al-Qaeda really up to?
By Pepe Escobar
Dec 8, 2010

It may be comforting to learn - once again thanks to WikiLeaks - that the United States State Department knows as much as any AfPak informed observer has known for years; that private donors, non-governmental organizations, madrassas and businesses from Saudi Arabia are ATMs for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

But this being a very sensitive oil-for-security "special relationship", naturally the Saudis also had to be credited with "significant progress" - under Washington pressure - in their efforts to smash al-Qaeda's cash fest. Yet not much, according to leaked cables, seems to be evolving in the Taliban/Lashkar front (and it won't, because virtually all these funds transit through the informal hawala system.)

~snip~

Crucially, among all the sensitive sites for the US in the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, there's not a single one in Afghanistan, where the Pentagon/North Atlantic Treaty Organization, according to the official cover story, are fighting "al-Qaeda".

A February 2009 US State Department cable admits that an attack on any of these sites "could critically impact" the US's public health, economic life and national security. As if al-Qaeda would not have processed this kind of information by now. But if "al-Qaeda" is really this larger than life evil monster that the US intelligence agencies would like the world to fear - a monster that is fought by hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds - how come they are investing in toner cartridges from hell instead of paralyzing the Bab al-Mendeb?

The great Italian writer Umberto Eco, in an essay in the French daily Liberation, has pointed out how WikiLeaks has revealed that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's secrets are in fact empty secrets - thus stripped of their power. As much as WikiLeaks has revealed that the emperor is naked when the empire cannot even maintain its own secrets, it is legitimate to add it remains naked as it also cannot maintain its lies. Onwards with "death by a thousand cuts".