Freedom Lawyers of America

Russian Footprints :What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in Lebanon?
By Ion Mihai Pacepa

The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”

Today’s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general. Israel humiliated Egypt and Syria, whose bellicose governments were being run by Soviet razvedka (Russian for “foreign intelligence”) advisers, whereupon the Kremlin decided to arm Israel’s enemy neighbors, the Palestinians, and draw them into a terrorist war against Israel.

General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, who created Communist Romania’s intelligence structure and then rose to head up all of Soviet Russia’s foreign intelligence, often lectured me: “In today’s world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon.”Between 1968 and 1978, when I broke with Communism, the security forces of Romania alone sent two cargo planes full of military goodies every week to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon.

Since the fall of Communism the East German Stasi archives have revealed that, in 1983 alone, its foreign intelligence service sent $1,877,600 worth of AK-47 ammunition to Lebanon. According to Vaclav Havel, Communist Czechoslovakia shipped 1,000 tons of the odorless explosive Semtex-H (which can’t be detected by sniffer dogs) to Islamic terrorists — enough for 150 years.

The terrorist war per se came into action at the end of 1968, when the KGB transformed airplane hijacking — that weapon of choice for September 11, 2001 — into an instrument of terror. In 1969 alone there were 82 hijackings of planes worldwide, carried out by the KGB-financed PLO. In 1971, when I was visiting Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office, he called my attention to a sea of red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on the wall. Each flag represented a captured plane. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,” he claimed.

The political “success” occasioned by hijacking Israeli airplanes prompted the KGB’s 13th Department, known in our intelligence jargon as the “Department for Wet Affairs” (wet being a euphemism for bloody), to expand into organizing “public executions” of Jews in airports, train stations, and other public places. In 1969 Dr. George Habash, a KGB puppet, explained: “Killing one Jew far away from the field of battle is more effective than killing a hundred Jews on the field of battle, because it attracts more attention.”

By the end of the 1960s, the KGB was deeply involved in mass terrorism against Jews, carried out by various Palestinian client organizations. Here are some terrorist actions for which the KGB took credit while I was still in Romania: November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.

In 1971, the KGB launched operation Tayfun (Russian for “typhoon”), aimed at destabilizing Western Europe. The Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction (RAF), and other KGB-sponsored Marxist organizations unleashed a wave of anti-American terrorism that shook Western Europe. Richard Welsh, the CIA station chief in Athens, was shot to death in Greece on December 23, 1975. General Alexander Haig, commander of NATO in Brussels was injured in a bomb attack that damaged his armored Mercedes beyond repair in June 1979. General Frederick J. Kroesen, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, barely survived a rocket attack in September 1981. Alfred Herrhausen, the pro-American chairman of Deutsche Bank, was killed during a grenade attack in November 1989. Hans Neusel, a pro-American state secretary in the West German interior ministry, was wounded during an assassination attempt in July 1990.

In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me, a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe. According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep.

The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized. We had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were “fascist, imperial-Zionist countries” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.

The codename of this operation was “SIG” (Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments”), and was within my Romanian service’s “sphere of influence,” for it embraced Libya, Lebanon, and Syria. SIG was a large party/state operation. We created joint ventures to build hospitals, houses, and roads in these countries, and there we sent thousands of doctors, engineers, technicians, professors, and even dance instructors. All had the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world. In the mid 1970s, the KGB ordered my service, the DIE — along with other East European sister services — to scour the country for trusted party activists belonging to various Islamic ethnic groups, train them in disinformation and terrorist operations, and infiltrate them into the countries of our “sphere of influence.”

Their task was to export a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism by manipulating the ancestral abhorrence for Jews felt by the people in that part of the world. Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, my DIE had dispatched around 500 such undercover agents to Islamic countries. According to a rough estimate received from Moscow, by 1978 the whole Soviet-bloc intelligence community had sent some 4,000 such agents of influence into the Islamic world.

In the mid-1970s we also started showering the Islamic world with an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a tsarist Russian forgery that had been used by Hitler as the foundation for his anti-Semitic philosophy. We also disseminated a KGB-fabricated “documentary” paper in Arabic alleging that Israel and its main supporter, the United States, were Zionist countries dedicated to converting the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles.

It is hard to say what exactly are the lasting effects of operation SIG. But the cumulative effect of disseminating hundreds of thousands of Protocols in the Islamic world and portraying Israel and the United States as Islam’s deadly enemies was surely not constructive. Post-Soviet Russia has been transformed in unprecedented ways, but the widely popular belief that the nefarious Soviet legacy was rooted out at the end of the Cold War the same way that Nazism was rooted out with the conclusion of World War II, is not yet correct.

In the 1950s, when I was chief of Romania’s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler’s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded, and the Nazis removed from public office.

None of these things has happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although the Soviet Union’s Communist regime killed over a hundred million people. Most Soviet institutions have been left in place, having simply been given new names, and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Communist state. In 2000, former officers of the KGB and the Soviet Red Army took over the Kremlin and Russia’s government.

Germany would have never become a democracy with Gestapo and SS officers running the show.

On September 11, 2001, President Vladimir Putin became the first leader of a foreign country to express sympathy to President George W. Bush for what he called “these terrible tragedies of the terrorist attacks.” Soon, however, Putin began moving his country back into the terrorist business. In March 2002, he quietly reinstituted sales of weapons to Iran’s terrorist dictator, Ayatollah Khamenei, and engaged Russia in the construction of a 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor at Bushehr, with a uranium conversion facility able to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Hundreds of Russian technicians also started helping the government of Iran to develop the Shahab-4 missile, with a range of over 1,250 miles, which can carry a nuclear or germ warhead anywhere in the Middle East and Europe.

Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had already announced that nothing could stop his country from building nuclear weapons, and he stated that Israel was a “disgraceful stain [on] the Islamic world” that would be eliminated.

During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to eradicate Nazism and its anti-Semitic terrorism. Now we are facing Islamic fascism and nuclear anti-Semitic terrorism. The United Nations can offer no hope. It has not yet even been able to define terrorism.A proverb says that one fire drives out another.

The Kremlin may be our best hope. In May 2002, the NATO foreign ministers approved a partnership with Russia, the alliance’s former enemy. The rest of the world said that the Cold War was over and done with. Kaput. Now Russia wants to be admitted to the World Trade Organization.

For that to happen, the Kremlin should be firmly told first to get out of the terrorism business. We should also help the Russians realize that it is in their own interest to make President Ahmadinejad renounce nuclear weapons. He is an unpredictable tyrant who may also consider Russia an enemy at some point in time. “If Iran gets weapons of mass destruction, deliverable by a missile, that’s going to be a problem,” President Bush correctly stated. “That’s going to be a problem for all of us, including Russia.”

—Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. His book Red Horizons has been republished in 27 countries.

On the heels of what it views as a Hizbullah victory against the Jewish state, Syria is forming its own Hizbullah-like guerilla organization to fight Israel in hopes of "liberating" the Golan Heights, an official from Syrian President Bashar Assad's Ba'ath party told WorldNetDaily yesterday.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Syria learned from Hizbullah's military campaign against Israel the past month that "fighting" is more effective than peace negotiations with regard to gaining territory.

He said Syria's new guerilla force would be trained by Hizbullah leaders.

"Syria is very serious about establishing this new guerilla force," the official said.

Hizbullah claims its goal is to liberate the Shebaa Farms, a small, 200-square-kilometer bloc situated between Syria, Lebanon and Israel. The Farms is the last post held by Israel after its withdrawal in 2000 from positions it took along the Lebanese border.

Most western analysts agree Hizbullah uses the pretext of the Shebaa Farms to maintain its weapons to start conflicts with the Jewish state. Hizbullah is sponsored by Syria and Iran.

The ceasefire resolution accepted by Israel earlier this week calls for negotiations leading to Israel's relinquishing of the Shebaa Farms.

'Hundreds of Syrian volunteers'

The Baath party official told WND the new Syrian "resistance" group is calling itself the Front for the Liberation of the Golan, and is already in the process of being formed. He said it seeks to ensure the return of the Golan Heights.

Israel captured the Heights, strategic mountainous territory, after Syria used the terrain to attack the Jewish state in 1967 and again in 1973. The Golan Heights borders Israel, Syria and Lebanon.

Israeli security officials said they had no information about the Front for the Liberation of the Golan.

The Ba'ath party official told WND the Front was formed last month and will attempt attacks against Israel.

The official said the group currently consists of "hundreds" of Syrian volunteers, many from the Syrian border with Turkey. He said Syria held registration for volunteers to join the Front in June.

The official said most Front members will be Palestinian and not members of the Syrian army.
"We know from history guerilla resistance works against Israel," said the official.

He pointed not only to Israel's most recent confrontation with Hizbullah, but also to what he said was a previous Syrian "victory" against the Israeli Defense Forces using guerilla tactics.

"After a ceasefire was imposed in 1973 (following the Yom Kippur War) for 100 days Syria led guerilla attacks against Israel in the
Golan Heights and they were successful. The IDF withdrew nearly 100 kilometers from the original ceasefire lines."

Indeed, after Syria accepted a United Nations cease-fire in October 1973, it waged a sporadic guerilla campaign against Israeli troops in the Golan until a disengagement agreement was reached March 31, 1974, that saw Israel withdraw from some sections of the territory.

Reprinted with permission of WorldNetDaily

Al-aqsa leader: Hizbullah defeated 'gay' Israeli soldiers

Terror leader says Palestinian groups smell victory after Lebanon war, emboldened to attack Aaron Klein, WND

Israel 's military campaign against Hizbullah in Lebanon was a "failure" and demonstrated to Palestinian groups the Jewish state is weak and can ultimately be defeated, a senior terror leader told WorldNetDaily in an interview.
The leader, Abu Oudai, chief rocket coordinator for the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank, said Hizbullah's "tremendous victory" has emboldened his group and other Palestinian terror organizations to immediately coordinate violence against Israel and to focus their "resistance" on rocket attacks.
"I think the most important achievement this war in Lebanon demonstrated is that Israel – with all its power, its air force, its tanks, its navy and its unlimited budget – can be defeated," said Abu Oudai.
"If we do (what Hizbullah accomplished), this Israeli army full of gay soldiers and full of corruption and with old-fashioned war methods can be defeated also in Palestine."
"See the hundreds of Israeli tanks that the Mujahedeen had destroyed; the aircraft that were shot down; the Israelis – most of them soldiers - that Hizbullah killed. But above all the promise Hizbullah kept that no matter what the Israeli army will do and no matter how deep it will get inside Lebanon, Hizbullah will keep shooting the Israeli sites in the north of Israel (with rockets)."
Abu Oudai's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the declared "military wing" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, is responsible for scores of shooting attacks, rocket launchings and, together with Islamic Jihad, every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years.
Israel says senior Brigades leaders, particularly the group's cells in the northern West Bank, coordinate their attacks with Hizbullah and receive funding from Iran and Syria funneled through Hizbullah channels. Several Brigades leaders have spoken openly to WorldNetDaily about their group's affiliation with Hizbullah.
'Olmert's claims of victory are delusional'
In an address to the Knesset Monday Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the ceasefire was a substantial achievement for Israel.
"There is no longer a state within a state, an entity that exploits Lebanon's weakness," he said.
Olmert said Israel's military campaign in Lebanon had "changed the strategic balance in the region" to Hizbullah's disadvantage.
He claimed Hizbullah's vast arsenal of weapons had been largely destroyed and the terror group's self-confidence was undermined. His comments aroused audible scoffs from other Knesset members.
But Abu Oudai said his group feels there is "no question" Israel lost the war. He called Olmert's statements of victory "delusional."
"Nobody will deny that Hizbullah won. It won not only because it fought for more than 30 days on the ground against the soldiers whom we thought were the best in the world, not only because the Israeli raids did not prevent it from shooting its missiles, but because after 30 days of battles the truth is that the last confrontations took place very close to the Israeli borders.
"The military plans of Hizbullah on the ground, the ability to adapt the plans to the Israeli plans and tricks, the fact that even after Israeli sieges from the air, from the sea and on earth Hizbullah succeeded to resupply its fighters with weapons, it succeeded to keep in contact with them on all levels of the command and that its bunker system was a fatal and deadly trap for the Israelis.
"Hizbullah won because it shows that the Arab and Muslim world and its resistance had finally imposed a new equation – destructive Arab missiles versus destructive Israeli air raids; Arab refugees in Lebanon lead to Israeli refugees inside Israel. It is a totally new equation that marks a new era in the Middle East. It marks the beginning of the Arab and Muslims renaissance."
Abu Oudai said there was "no chance" an international or Lebanese force would stop Hizbullah from maintaining arms or from regrouping in south Lebanon.
"Only dumb, stupid and blind people can think that any international or local force can prevent the organization from keeping its military posts in the south and from receiving arms supplies from all around the world," said Abu Oudai.
UNIFIL? Friendly and cooperative
"I must admit that some of the United Nations International Force In Lebanon members had a very friendly and cooperative attitude toward Hizbullah. And can you imagine Hizbullah being defeated by thousands of soldiers who will be deployed with no political interest and with no enthusiasm on the ground?"
Abu Oudai said while Hizbullah took a "major hit" and lost many fighters the past month, the group's infrastructure in Lebanon was not minimized. He said Hizbullah still has the ability to fire hundreds of rockets per day into Israel.
The terror leader's estimates of Hizbullah's capabilities coincide with those of many senior military intelligence officials here, who say Hizbullah strongholds in the central regions of south Lebanon remain intact.
'Israel ripe for attack'
Abu Oudai said Israel's actions in Lebanon sent his group a message that Israel is weak and is ripe for attack. He said his group's rocket infrastructure, of which he is in charge, is the key to Israeli defeat.
"We learned what we already started to discover after Israel's Gaza withdrawal was implemented – that if there is faith and real commitment to Jihad we can beat and defeat the Israeli army.
"There is no doubt that one of our immediate conclusions is that we should appropriate very soon strategic tools such as missiles and more important things to built a military system that can enable us to survive the Israeli war machine. This takes time, but Gaza was the first proof, Lebanon now is one more better proof that the Israeli army can do little if we can hold more than a few weeks in front of its war machine and lead attacks.
"If we succeed to have improved rockets – and we are doing our best to have them – and to shoot them even if the army will invade us, it would be the beginning of the end of the occupation."
Abu Oudai also said Palestinian "resistance" groups should model themselves after Hizbullah and attempt to conduct guerilla warfare against Israel's army and not just "martyrdom operations" against Israeli civilians.
"We are working hard to carry out all kinds of attacks, but this is time to work silently and to prepare the war like Hizbullah did in the last six years. The war imposed high standards of military actions especially from Hizbullah. This should be our leading model for the future.
"If we do so, this Israeli army full of gay soldiers and full of corruption and with old-fashioned war methods can be defeated also in Palestine. The best is if it is a war in more than one front, and I believe it is not an impossible scenario."
The terror leader conceded, though, Israel's military failure may have been a result of poor Israeli leadership.
"(Hizbullah leader) Sheikh (Hassan) Nasrallah spoke on the eve of the war and warned the Israelis and the Israeli leadership from the lack of experience of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz. In the Quran it is written that there is a rotation in the power of people, and we believe it our time and if we respect Allah's instructions this land will be Muslim forever."
Reprinted with permission of WorldNetDaily

A senior Saudi religious figure, Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, published a fatwa establishing that "Hizbullah is not the 'Party of God' (the meaning of Hizbullah in Arabic), but the 'Party of Satan.'"

Al-Hawali is considered an extreme religious figure in Saudi Arabia. In the past Osama Bin Laden was among his students.

In the fatwa published on al-Hawali's website, it was written that it is forbidden to pray for Hizbullah, or to support the organization in any way. Al-Hawali's position, from the Wahhabi stream in Saudi Arabia, exemplifies the prevailing historic rift between Sunnis and Shiites , who, in the eyes of the Wahhabists are apostates.

The Wahhabists seek to cleanse Islam from innovations and deviations, which, according to them, violate Islam at its core, such as worshipping holy men and their graves, or decoration of mosques. The controversy between Sunnis and Shiites is not absolute. For example, the Sunni Muslim Brothers in Egypt have declared their support of Hizbullah.

Al-Hawali's words are an addition to a previous fatwa issued two weeks ago in Saudi Arabia by the leader of the Wahhabi movement, Sheikh Abdullah bin Jabrin, which declared that it is illegal to support, join, or even pray for Hizbullah. In the same fatwa, Iran was condemned for her involvement and financing of terrorist organizations.

The Saudi fatwas are joined by a fatwa issued by a Kuwaiti sheikh after the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers on the northern border, in which a harsh condemnation of "the imperialist aspirations of Iran by means of the organization" was published.

The conflict is also expressed in the Saudi government's position which has changed during the fighting. At first, the Saudi government condemned the kidnapping of IDF soldiers calling the Hizbullah operation "unplanned adventures," yet with the continuation of fighting between Israel and Hizbullah, Saudi Arabia called the US to stop Israel's operations in Lebanon lest the entire region deteriorate in war.

Citing intelligence alerts of possible violence, Jerusalem police announced Wednesday that the Temple Mount will be closed to non-Muslim visitors on Thursday, as the nation marks Tisha Be'av and the destruction of the biblical Jewish temples.

The largely expected police decision to shut the Mount to Jews and Christians on the fast day came just two days after the the High Court of Justice ruled that members of the Temple Mount Faithful - with the exception of the group's leader, Gershon Salomon - could enter the site on Tisha Be'av if it is open to visitors.

The decision to shut the Mount to visitors, which was made by Jerusalem police chief Cmdr. Ilan Franco, followed an amalgamation of intelligence information that thousands of Muslims were planning to flock to the site to "protect" it from Jews who were planning to visit on Tisha Be'av at the urging of "extremist" Jewish groups, Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said.
Muslim men younger than 45 will also be barred from entering the compound for the next 48 hours.In the past, the site has been repeatedly closed down to non-Muslim visitors on Tisha Be'av due to concern over the outbreak of violence, drawing the wrath of Israeli rightists who accuse police of "capitulating" to Arab threats.

Last year, the Temple Mount was shut on Tisha Be'av on the eve of the pullout from the Gaza Strip.