Once again, we are expected to believe a handful of patsies—excuse me, “terrorists”—were capable of taking out a U.S. military base, this time the Ramstein air base in Germany, but thanks to the diligent work of Germany’s “special police officers,” these America-hating miscreants were apprehended before they attacked. In addition to Ramstein, reports the New York Times, these would-be terrorists plotted “massive attacks” against the Frankfurt international airport and “several sites frequented by Americans, including discos [and] bars…. German and American officials said that such indicators made them suspect (sic) connections to Al Qaeda.”

Monika Harms, the German federal prosecutor, “said the three suspects arrested Tuesday belonged to a German cell of the Islamic Jihad Union, a radical Sunni group based in Central Asia that split from the extremist Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,” thus making the “connections to Al Qaeda” suspect—or maybe not so suspect, as “al-Qaeda” has served for some time now as a handy-dandy false flag operative, a fact well documented, never mind a fact strenuously ignored by the corporate media.


According to the New York Times, while the Islamic Jihad Union “has not been linked to terrorist attacks in Europe, it has claimed credit for suicide bombings in July 2004 near the United States and Israeli Embassies in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. The group has called for the overthrow of the secular government in Uzbekistan.” However, as Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, notes, the “evidence that this organization exists at all is extremely tenuous, and if it does it is almost certainly the fruit of an Uzbek agent provocateur operation.”

Moreover, according to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, the Islamic Jihad Union, aka the Islamic Jihad Group, appears to be bogus, as “officials doubted the existence of the unknown group, and blamed other extremist organizations” for terror attacks carried out against the U.S. embassy, the Israeli embassy, and the Uzbek Prosecutor General on July 30, 2004.

The Islamic Jihad Group is described as a “splinter” group of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant Islamist group formed in 1998 by former Soviet paratrooper Juma Namangani. “Operating out of bases in Tajikistan and Taliban-controlled areas of northern Afghanistan, the IMU launched a series of audacious raids into Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan in 1999 and 2000,” explains Wikipedia. As Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has noted, “incursions from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan into the three Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan by Islamic militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) are part of a wider strategic co-ordination with the Taliban….”

For this offensive the Taliban have some 6,000-7,000 troops that include Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs from the forces of Osama Bin Laden, and the multi-ethnic forces of the IMU and its leader Juma Namangani. The IMU has a wide recruiting base of Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Chechens and even some Uyghurs from China’s Xinjiang province. They also have close links with Bin Laden’s Arab Brigade and have been financed by Bin Laden, and have received recruits and finances from Pakistani Islamic parties such as the anti-Shia ‘Sipha-e-Sahaba’ and the ‘Harkat Ul Mujheddin.’

In other words, the IMU was a CIA-ISI construct, as its “splinter” group the Islamic Jihad Union likely is. “IMU leader Namangani reportedly received sanctuary and support from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), until at least 2001,” writes Richard Weitz for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “Before 11 September 2001, several ISI operatives reportedly also worked closely with the IMU’s Afghan sponsors, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Some of the Islamic political parties in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier also have historic ties to the IMU. For example, Sipha-e-Sahaba and Harkat Ul Mujheddin have provided recruits and finances to the IMU in the past.” Call it one big happy CIA-ISI sponsored family.

Naturally, this inconvenient history lesson is meaningless in the current context, as the objective is to keep the fictive “al-Qaeda” horror show—with its “homegrown” component—rolling along. In order to underscore the threat European commoners face, AXcess News reports “in Denmark, security officials arrested eight men linked to al Qaeda that were plotting a terror attack. German officials said the Danish arrests may have been linked to the three terror suspected picked up in Germany.”