Voice of Russia
May 1, 2013
Terrorism: It is a duplicitous game which the US is good at playing – Rozoff
Recorded on April 21, 2013
AUDIO
One of the Boston Marathon bombers praised U.S.-backed-terrorists operating in Syria against President Bashar Al-Assad shortly before he set off the bombs which tore through the crowds at the finish line in Boston. Rick Rozoff considers the implications of the fact that these Chechen-born terrorists were given asylum by the United States. For the U.S., terrorism is okay when it happens to other countries, especially if it assists in attaining geopolitical goals. Mr. Rozoff from Stop NATO, also talks about plans by NATO, already in place, to pull Syria and Lebanon into NATO once their regimes are changed.
Rozoff: I really wish your listeners would take this in: Every country in Europe excluding the five micro-states [Andorra, Lichtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican] is either a member of NATO or a member of a NATO partnership program except for, at the moment, Cyprus, but with the change in government in Cyprus several weeks ago the new administration has indicated clearly they are going to join NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, which now means that every European state is either a NATO member or a NATO partner. Every one, bar none.
Robles: I think that is what they wanted.
Rozoff: Of course it is, but if we had had this discussion 20 years ago and somebody were to tell you in a generation in the future every country in Europe would be – and we have to remember the anecdote about at the time the US Secretary of State James Baker assuring the first and last president of the Soviet Union Michael Gorbachev that NATO would not expand one inch or one foot or one mile eastward.
Robles: At that point I think we would have agreed that NATO would be dissolved right after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved.
Rozoff: But now it has ensconced itself firmly as a political force in East Asia, throughout the Mediterranean, in the South Caucuses, in Central Asia, in the Middle East…One other thing we should mention before I forget, inbetween the Baltic States and Northeast Asia is the Persian Gulf, and in the last week or so the United Arab Emirates has opened up an embassy at NATO Headquarters.
NATO has divulged, more than acknowledged, that it has a military training site right now in Kuwait. A NATO delegation recently went to several Persian Gulf states. It has a military partnership, I mentioned earlier, as one of the four that participated in the Bosnia event, that is called the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, set up nine years ago in 2004 at the NATO summit at Istanbul, Turkey, which has pulled in the Persian Gulf sheikdoms and monarchies in the Gulf Cooperation Council into a formal military alliance with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
So, now we have NATO – this is the best way I could encapsulize it – NATO is not only aimed at Russia and Russia’s western and southern borders, it’s now increasingly situating itself or entering into military partnership with nations facing China, and it’s consolidating a military partnership in the Persian Gulf aimed squarely at Iran.
Robles: Anything new with Syria and Israel, this 123 million dollar assistance package for the poor Syrian insurgents?
Rozoff: You perhaps have seen, or many of your listeners have seen or read the statement that one of the two suspects, the one killed I believe, in Boston (at the bombing at the Boston Marathon), supposedly hours before, or shortly before his death, posted on his Facebook account or some other site his support for the anti-government rebels in Syria.
I don’t know if that’s been substantiated but it sounds plausible, and it is at precisely that time that the vice president of the United States, Joseph Biden, announces 123 million dollars in supposedly non-lethal aid to the very Syrian rebels being praised by the mastermind of the bomb attack in Boston last week. So, that’s I think more than an irony. I think it is an indication about where the US really stands on the question of international terrorism if it affects any country other than itself and its allies.
Robles: So, this terrorist, he was praising the terrorists in Syria that the US is funding?
Rozoff: That’s it, exactly.
Robles: We can go back to agent Tom Ossman (Osama Bin Laden), who was created I believe and funded by the US from the beginning, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, I think the whole thing with terrorism and the US is: they have supported it, they’ve backed it, it’s back-fired time and time again.
Rozoff: Backfired at the very least, but I think it is even more insidious than that. It is almost as though a modern-day Doctor Frankenstein stitches together some misshapen monster who goes on a killing spree but until he actually assaults the doctor’s own bride, what he has done is either permitted to occur or encouraged or supported. And even after striking the creator’s own homeland, the creator still supports it abroad when it’s convenient because there are cross-border separatist and other attacks that really have to be characterized as terrorist if the word terrorism has any meaning.
Robles: Do you agree that the entire war on terror paradigm requires terrorists to continue existing and the entire militarization of the planet requires an enemy? I mean, if they don’t have one, they’ll have to create one to justify their own existence.
Rozoff: To paraphrase Voltaire, if terrorism didn’t exist it would have to be created, or something to replace communism after 1991, but I think even more than that to compare great things to small, every so often you read in the local press, as I read here in Chicago, about some firefighter in a suburban community who has been charged with arson, with the understanding that the more fires there are the more work there is for him.
Far be it from me to openly accuse any particular law enforcement agency of doing that, but it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibilities that that occurs, and I think this also should be brought to people’s attention: now that Chechnya is on people’s minds because of the attack in Boston, even though it is a real question whether the two young men did it, and I think enterprising journalists, especially investigative journalists, really ought to find out the history of how the two alleged perpetrators and their family achieved asylum in the United States and whether in fact they didn’t receive political refugee status. And if so, that could only be in reference to alleged Russian government persecution, could it not? I don’t see any other scenario.
Robles: There are many Chechens who have asylum, known cop killers…
Rozoff: Yes, Ahmed Zakaev.
Robles: I mean he was supposedly guilty of killing over 23 police officers.
Rozoff: John, but my point is because of the topicality of the tragedy in Boston, that we have a couple things: we have the fact that the perpetrators may very well have received political refugee status, or family members did, because of alleged persecution by the government of Russia. That’s number one.
Number two, we do know now that the Russian government, Russian intelligence, probably the Federal Security Bureau, contacted the FBI two years ago and asked that the older brother be monitored, and the FBI gave them a clean bill of health.
But I am raising another issue that most people haven’t thought about: that after the attacks in the United States on 9/11 of 2001, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at one point, I believe in a telephone conversation, mentioned the Kodori Gorge [should be Pankisi Gorge] in Georgia, which connects Georgia with Russia.
Russia has been complaining for years that the Georgian government was permitting Chechen and other terrorists to operate out of the Gorge, out of the valley, to launch attacks inside Russia, and Rumsfeld mentioned that.
Now at the time I think that was considered to be an effort for him to try enlist Russian support in the so-called “global war on terrorism,” but what in fact occurred was immediately afterwards the Pentagon, he, deployed Green Beret special forces instructors to Georgia to train the Georgian military in what is called a train and equip program which persists to this day. It was handed over by the Green Berets to the US Marine Corps.
With the fact that the alleged perpetrators in Boston are ethnic Chechens, does this give the United States an opportunity to increase its intelligence and military presence in Georgia and possibly Azerbaijan under the guise of fighting the Chechen terrorists who struck “the heartland of America”? Right?
Robles: After 9/11 they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, even though they were 19 Egyptian terrorists, they didn’t of course invade Egypt and we’re thinking: “Okay, now they’re going to what? Invade Chechnya?”, but this is Russian territory.
Rozoff: They couldn’t openly intervene there. So my suspicion would be again: under the pretense of fighting the very same forces they have backhandedly supported, as you indicate, for the past 28 years, which is Chechen and Dagestani separatists – religious theocratic extremists – that the US will beef up its military presence in Georgia and possibly Azerbaijan.
Which is something long under way and which I am sure they had intended otherwise. This provides them with the rationale for doing so. So, I would be concerned about that.
The US, I’m sure, will make (how sincere or not) overtures to Russia to help it solve the problem with certain terrorists. As you indicate, not only in London but in Washington major ethnic Chechen and Dagestani separatist leaders have been granted political asylum, sometimes in rather lucrative positions with think tanks and other organizations here in the United States as well as Britain.
So, it’s a duplicitous game. That is what the US is good at doing; supporting something backhandedly behind closed doors in one sense and openly proclaiming the opposite. It won’t be the first thing that’s occurred.
We should keep in mind since we were talking about Georgia that what is now called…there is another new phenomenon that people are probably not aware of, something called the Black Sea Rotational Force. The US Marine Corps, I believe three years ago, set up something called a Black Sea Rotational Force. It is based six months of the year in Romania, and its task is to train with, which is to say to integrate the militaries of 14 nations in the greater Black Sea Region, but also in the Caucuses, including Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, all of the Balkan States, but also I believe Moldova for sure and I am quite sure Ukraine into the bargain.
But the Black Sea Rotational Force of US Marines recently staged joint military exercises with the Georgian armed forces, Agile Spirit. It’s now going to be deployed, even though it is way out of its area of responsibility, to the Baltic states for this year’s Baltic Operations, BALTOPS, where they participated last year, incidentally.
So, people think that with the budgetary cutbacks resulting from the financial crisis that began almost five years ago, that the US is cutting back its military presence around the world. That is not true.
The government of Spain now has permitted 500 US Marines, a US military strike force, and military aircraft to be based in southern Spain for operations in Africa. This is just openly, how I described it.
And this is in addition to the fact that roughly last year Spain announced that it would permit the United States to base four guided missile destroyers as part of the interceptor missile system, Phase 1 of NATO’s interceptor missile system in Europe, to patrol the Mediterranean Sea.
A guided missile destroyer can fire an interceptor missile but can also fire an offensive missile. That’s what it was designed for.
These are four more ships in addition to the US 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea and NATO’s so-called Operation Active Endeavor, which has been active since 2001, to have turned the Mediterranean Sea into a private Pentagon-NATO preserve, which it is. And now, as alluded to earlier, with the last European hold-out, Cyprus, coming into NATO’s camp and Libya soon to join NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue, in the attempt to drag post-Assad Syria and Lebanon into that NATO program, turning the entire Mediterranean Sea Basin into NATO’s sea.
Robles: You mean NATO’s already taken steps to pull post-Assad Syria into NATO?
Rozoff: You heard this from me but I’ve been saying it for two years. And one thing I did predict before the fact was that when NATO took over from US Africa Command the air war and naval blockade against Libya two years ago, so-called Operation Unified Protector, that at the end of it, Libya, which has been the only North African country not a member of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue, that it would be incorporated into the Mediterranean Dialogue. That fact was stated immediately after the overthrow and murder of Muammar Gaddafi by no less authorities than the US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder and the Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen who confirmed that.
Now that would mean that the only two countries in the area of responsibility of the Mediterranean Dialogue would be Lebanon and Syria and I have no question in my mind that they are targeted, after the regime change in both countries, to be incorporated into a NATO program. And, I believe, the United States intends both Yemen and Iraq to be pulled into the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with the Persian Gulf monarchies.
Robles: Oh my God! Rick, sorry we have to stop because I have to read the news.
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