So on Tuesday, Homeland Security released its new, “grim assessment” of the global terrorist threat and concluded that, while everything the Bush administration has been doing for the last six years has saved us from oh, at least seven other 9/11s, we are still more in danger than ever, especially over the next three years (well that takes care of the election and beyond), and Al Qaeda is re-grouping along the Afghan border in Pakistan, and hey, we really have to do something about Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

No. Really?

I wonder why the mainstream media response to this latest bit of Bush administration fear-mongering, even as it—finally—calls it fear-mongering, misses out on the chance to put the focus of this shocking terror assessment—Pakistan—into historical perspective. It's no secret that Al Qaeda was born on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan in the late 1980s, and has been there ever since.

I remember with a shudder the image, in the days just after 9/11, of George Bush standing alongside Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a hairy mushroom of a man in military brown, and announcing how this noble fellow was going to be our great ally in the war on terror. This image did not inspire confidence.

Musharraf, who almost died after falling out of a mango tree as a teenager, is now serving as a convenient fall guy: “In identifying the main reasons for Al Qaeda’s resurgence,” the New York Times reported yesterday, Wednesday, “intelligence officials and White House aides pointed the finger squarely at a hands-off approach toward the tribal areas by Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who last year brokered a cease-fire with tribal leaders in an effort to drain support for Islamic extremism in the region.”

Musharraf, who appointed himself president of Pakistan in June of 2001, two years after a military coup d’etat, is not a very popular guy within his own country, where he acts the repressive despot (firing judges, attacking dissidents, jailing innocents—hey, sound familiar?) and is seen as a puppet of the West. Now, with the U.S. suddenly blaming him for the growth of Al Qaeda, his days may actually be numbered. (See Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein; oh but wait, they didn’t have nuclear weapons, as Pakistan has since 1998.)

But is the flourishing of Al Qaeda along the Pakistan border really Musharraf’s fault? Hardly. Al Qaeda, which, as we know, means “The Base” in Arabic, has always had its home base in Pakistan. To understand any of this you have to talk about the real power in the country—the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which put Musharraf in his job. “Even by the shadowy standards of spy agencies, the ISI is notorious. It is commonly branded ‘a state within a state,’ or Pakistan’s invisible government,” Time said in 2002.

It’s no conspiracy theory, but the stuff of history that the ISI has decades-old links to both the CIA and Osama Bin Laden. The U.S. government swears up and down it has never had anything to do with Bin Laden or Al Qaeda; but it has had plenty to do with the ISI. During the 1980s, the United States gave billions of dollars in aid to the ISI, which the ISI then funneled to the Afghans fighting the Soviet Union. It equipped them with troops and ammunition and weapons, including those lovely Stinger surface-to-air missiles we’re now so worried about landing in the hands of terrorists.

The CIA code name for its program to arm Islamic mujahideen via the ISI was “Operation Cyclone”—aptly enough, since we have since reaped the whirlwind. In the late ‘80s, according to Newsweek, Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto, alarmed by the growing radical Islamist movement, warned President George H.W. Bush, "You are creating a Frankenstein." The Taliban—which became our enemy in the war in Afghanistan—was the Frankenstein the Cyclone wrought.

Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran ISI’s Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987, has been quoted as saying: “The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers' money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan's policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.”

Sounds kind of dangerous. And it was. In his book “Against All Enemies,” former “terrorism tsar” Richard Clarke said that not only did the ISI create the Taliban, it networked the Taliban with Al-Qaeda. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Osama Bin Laden was just a 20-something economics school graduate and mujahideen sympathizer when he moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani town on the Afghan border some time in the early ‘80s. By 1984, he had helped found and was running MAK, the Maktab al-Khidamar, an organization which fielded assistance, money and guns, to the mujahideen from other places. He broke from MAK and formed Al Qaeda around 1989.

Bin Laden was also said to be one of the organizers of U.S.-backed training camps for radicalized Muslims, although, again, the United States has denied ever giving him or Al Qaeda any financial assistance directly.

But that’s sort of a hair-splitter; weapons and funding could have easily found their way into whoever’s hands the ISI deemed worthy. “It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune,” gloated our friend Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, the former head of the ISI's Afghan operation in the '80s. By 1987, 65,000 tons of U.S.-made weapons a year were entering Afghanistan. The ISI was also running a major international heroin business to help fund its operations—and also try and turn Soviet troops in Afghanistan into junkies. Does that sound like one of those nifty CIA plots, like trying to make Castro's beard fall off (see "The Family Jewels")? Seems it was. In 1999, the United Nations determined that the ISI made around $2.5 billion annually from the sale of illegal drugs.

There were multiple ways for the ISI to route money to Al Qaeda. Remember BCCI? Based in Pakistan, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International financed numerous Muslim terrorist organizations and laundered money generated by drug trafficking and other illegal activities. “BCCI did dirty work for every major terrorist service in the world,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2002. The Washington Post reported that “The CIA used BCCI to funnel millions of dollars to the fighters battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” (The ruling family of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates—said to be the richest city in the world and another one of the Bush administration's favorite “allies"—owned 77% of the bank.)

BCCI was shut down by the Bank of England in 1991, but others like it have taken its place. It’s in the news today, Thursday, that Mariane Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, is suing “Al Qaeda, other radical groups and Pakistan-based Habib Bank Ltd. over the 2002 abduction, torture and murder of her husband.” I can see her point. And it may be a way to open up the history of this whole ugly mess. But if you follow the money trail, then why isn’t Mrs. Pearl also suing the ISI? Or for that matter, the CIA, which funded the ISI? Or the U.S. government, which funded the CIA? (“She swallowed the spider to catch the fly…”) Maybe she will.

“Habib Bank Limited is one of Pakistan's biggest banks,” Reuters says today, in a story about the case. “The lawsuit alleges the bank and its subsidiaries knowingly conducted financial transactions on behalf of charities linked to extremist groups. In doing so Habib and its subsidiaries aided, abetted and provided material support in the form of financial services for the terrorist support organizations," the suit said…

“Another defendant is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a suspected high-ranking al Qaeda leader and September 11 mastermind who is in U.S. custody. Mohammed admitted to a U.S. military tribunal that he beheaded Pearl, the U.S. military said…

“Among those [being] sued is [also] Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, or Sheikh Omar, who was convicted and sentenced to death in a Pakistani court for his role in the abduction and murder. Three others were jailed for life.”

If there is anyone who personifies the link between the ISI and Al Qaeda, it is Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was not only one of Daniel Pearl's killers but widely reported to be have been a funder of the 9/11 hijackers.

Born in Pakistan, Sheikh attended the London School of Economics and trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan run by the ISI. When he was arrested for kidnapping Western tourists in India, in 1994, the ISI paid for his lawyer (this has all been in Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times).

In prison in India between 1994 and 1999, Sheikh met fellow prisoners Aftab Ansari and Asif Raza Khan, both Indian gangsters; he later plotted more kidnappings with them which allegedly raised the money he sent to the 9/11 hijackers. In prison, Sheikh also became friendly with Maulana Masood Azhar, a terrorist with Al Qaeda connections.

Meanwhile, shortly after Musharraf was made leader of Pakistan, post-the military coup in 1999 (the New York Times said in December of 2001 that the ISI had supported the ousting of democratically elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif “out of fear that he might buckle to American pressure and reverse Pakistan’s policy [of supporting] the Taliban”), he replaced the head of the ISI with Lieutenant General Mahmoud Ahmad. Remember that name; Ahmad was in Washington meeting with American officials on the morning of 9/11.

But first back to the Saeed Sheikh/ISI/Al Qaeda connection: In 1999, through a hostage swap deal, Sheikh was released from jail. He promptly went to Kandahar to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden, who reportedly called him “my special son.” When he returned to Pakistan, the ISI installed him in a new home, Vanity Fair reported in 2002. Newsweek also said that Saeed was deemed by U.S. authorities to be connected to the ISI; throughout 2000 and 2001, he lived openly in Pakistan, hobnobbing with top Pakistani officials. He even returned to Britain to visit his parents.

The New York Times reported how Saeed was also traveling back and forth to Afghanistan during this time, 2000 to 2001, and training recruits in terrorist training camps there. According to Vanity Fair, he helped Al Qaeda to set up an Internet communications system, and there was even talk that he might succeed Bin Laden, who had become ill and needed kidney dialysis (according to CBS News, the ISI facilitated Bin Laden’s medical treatment).

In May of 2001, Pakistan received a visit from CIA Director George Tenet and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage (a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan, who signed the now infamous, 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to Bill Clinton, urging military action in Iraq). Tenet met with Musharraf; and, it has been reported, also with ISI Director Mahmoud Ahmad. The details of their meeting are not known, but they undoubtedly included the ISI’s continued support of the Taliban—an organization created indirectly by U.S. policy, money and arms, which had now become its own independent agent and a terrorist organization.

(Despite this, the United States had for years been trying to negotiate with the Taliban about building an oil pipeline. Seems it was just too tempting, the idea of Texas oilmen building a pipeline from the Caspian fields to Pakistan by way of Afghanistan, circumventing Iran. “Twice in 1997 Taliban leaders traveled to Washington (and Texas) to discuss the pipeline with officials of the State Department and the US oil conglomerate Unocal,” according to the Nation. “Unocal itself disclosed that it spent between $15 million and $20 million on the initial stages of the project, including the salaries of two consultants hired to negotiate the deal: Hamid Karzai, now President of Afghanistan, and Zalmay Khalilzad, then a Pentagon planner, later Ambassador to Afghanistan and currently Ambassador to Iraq. Khalilzad's predecessor in Afghanistan, George W. Bush's first ambassador there, was Robert Finn, well-known Caspian oil expert. These facts [have been] well documented by others.”)

More later…