Rigged Perception: Who Really Runs the Terrorist Network

Abu Bakar Bashir: Terrorist or CIA-Mossad Patsy?
March 03, 2005

The United States and Australia wanted Abu Bakar Bashir, supposedly the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, to spend the rest of his life in prison for the Bali bombing. Instead, Bashir was “sentenced Thursday to 2 1/2 years in prison for conspiracy,” although the United States and Australia “were hoping for a lengthy prison term to deter terrorism in the world’s most populous Muslim nation [Indonesia],” according to ABC News. “We’d have liked a longer sentence,” lamented Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

Jemaah Islamiyah is described as a militant Islamic separatist movement dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist Islamic state in Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, and the south of Thailand and the Philippines, as noted by Wikipedia. It is said Jemaah Islamiyah is an al-Qaeda franchise and is connected to Abu Sayyaf, a separatist group based in and around the southern islands of the Philippines, primarily Jolo, Basilan, and Mindanao.

It is interesting Bashir stands accused of leading Jemaah Islamiyah and yet claims both Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda are CIA ops designed to “to persecute Muslims throughout the world,” according to Richard S. Ehrlich of the Bangkok Post.

According to Sayed Abdullah, who operates an intelligence services firm in Indonesia, “It is clear that the CIA and the Mossad have infiltrated such organizations [Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas, and Hezbollah].” Abdullah told Kazi Mahmood of IslamOnline the he believe it “is obvious the CIA and the Mossad, assisted by the Australian Special Action Police (SAP) and the M15 of England, are all working towards undermining Muslim organizations in an attempt to weaken the Muslims globally.”

It is no secret the CIA has run covert operations for decades. In Indonesia, the CIA “infiltrated arms and personnel in support of the regional rebellions against Sukarno,” writes Peter Dale Scott. The CIA and the Indonesian military organized “civilian murder bands” that ultimately slaughtered between 250,000 and 500,000 people in 1965. As Mark Zepezauer explains, the “Indonesian military, trained and backed by the US, provoked a leftist coup against its leader, General Suharto. When the coup failed, the military used it as an excuse to depose Sukarno and replace him with Suharto. (According to diplomatic documents, the coup was a setup to justify the military takeover.)”

Organizing, training, and funding radical Mujahedeen in Afghanistan—including Osama bin Laden—is considered the CIA’s “largest and most successful CIA operation in history” and “the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time,” according to George Crile, a veteran producer for the CBS’ 60 Minutes. (See The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History by Chalmers Johnson.)

“By way of deception, thou shalt do war,” is the motto of Mossad, according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent. “Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with the Mossad’s general plan,” writes Ostrovsky. In fact, as UPI correspondent Richard Sale documents, Israel actively funded Hamas. Brig. Gen. Yithaq Segev, the military governor of Gaza, told Sale Israel funded “Islamic movements as a counterweight to the PLO and communists.”

As Sayed Abdullah sees it, the Bali bombing was a classic false flag operation. Bali was “an operation clearly financed and assisted by the CIA and Mossad, made use of Muslims to carry out the final act. Those Muslims were not innocent since they took the bait handed over by the CIA and the Mossad to bomb Bali and to avenge against the U.S. war on the Muslims in Afghanistan.” Abdullah said “to achieve this, the CIA used one of its operatives, Omar Al-Faruq, an Arab living in the U.S. who speaks Arabic and knows a little about Islam and who was sent to Indonesia to infiltrate the so called terrorist groups.”

“Former State Intelligence Coordinating Board (BAKIN) [Badan Koordinasi Intelijen Negara, the Indonesian intelligence agency] chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaiti citizen Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor, West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three days later, is a CIA-recruited agent,” Tempo Interactive reported on September 19, 2002. According to Time Magazine, however, “al-Faruq was one of bin Laden’s top representatives in Southeast Asia, responsible for coordinating the activities of the region’s disparate Islamic militant groups and employing their forces to conduct terror attacks against the U.S. and its allies.”

It should be noted that Osama bin Laden worked for the CIA in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda would later appear in Bosnia to help “Kosovo rebels battle for independence from Serbia with the financial and military backing of the United States and NATO,” according to the National Post. “The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia … they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA, which had already received ’substantial’ military and financial support from bin Laden’s network, analysts say.”

Is it possible Omar Al-Faruq pulled off the Bali bombings with CIA-Mossad assistance and Abu Bakar Bashir is innocent? “How do we know that the CIA was behind the coup that overthrew Hugo Chavez?” writes William Blum. “Same way we know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. That’s what it’s always done and there’s no reason to think that tomorrow morning will be any different.” How do we know the CIA and Mossad were behind the Bali bombing? We don’t, not exactly, but we do know they have done similar things in the past.