Stories of terrorism

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I was once a graduate student in a Texas university and later for a brief period of time a PhD candidate here at the University of Houston. During lectures and discussion sessions in class, every time the issue of terrorism would come up, people sort of paid attention to what I had to say because the killing of Osama bin Laden had just happened a few years ago. And everyone knew that I was from Pakistan. The leading newspapers at the time dedicated an enormous amount of space to stories of terrorism, Taliban, Al Qaeda, and so forth mostly having a connection with Pakistan.

While that reporting has died down with time, what has rather emerged recently is the most bizarre and direct connection that terrorism always has had with either the CIA or the FBI. I have written in this space back in March that the cult leader Charles Manson and the notorious Manson family murders had a CIA connection. The CIA wanted to understand the extent of how much a human being could be converted into a human robot, where it would follow the command to go and kill innocent people without thought or remorse.

Theodore John Kaczynski aka Ted Kaczynski aka Unabomber went from being a Harvard genius to a terrorist that killed innocent people because of the extreme methods his mind was subjected to by the CIA as part of what was called Project MKUltra. We all know who the makers of Al Qaeda are and how Bin Laden was treated as a hero while he was fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The 90s decade is very interesting. Sheikh Omar Abdul Rehman, the blind cleric who ran away from Egypt, indoctrinated young Muslims in New York and New Jersey areas, to attack America. Ramzi Yousaf and his friends executed a bomb attack targeting the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. Two days later, in Texas, the FBI unleashed an attack against a religious cult known as Branch Davidians. At the end of the 51-day siege, the FBI ended up killing innocent people, including 21 children.

This Waco siege made one former US soldier, a Gulf War veteran, extremely angry at the federal government for its tyrannical tendencies and actions against private citizens. His name was Timothy McVeigh. He decided to take revenge. Two years after the Waco debacle, McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma city, killing 168 people. This remains the deadliest act of domestic terror in US history. McVeigh was arrested, tried, and killed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. That was three months before the most famous terrorist attack of our time.

McVeigh's case was handled with sheer alacrity and the case was ended creating a foul smell of a cover-up. There was an accomplice of him, which was never identified or found. It has been 30 years since that deadly terrorist attack and no effort has resulted in unmasking his identity. There is a video of the actual bomb delivery when McVeigh and his accomplice were carrying out the attack. That video has never been shown. It wasn't even shown at the trial of McVeigh. It only makes common sense for an investigative agency to get to the bottom of the story and find all those involved in the most deadly domestic terrorist attack of the nation's history. And that is when it all starts to smell of a cover-up.

The Epstein story smells of the same cover-up. The man is said to have killed himself in a jail cell and everything just was accepted on its face. Epstein's brother, however, hired a private investigation, which disagrees with the findings of the government that Epstein hanged himself in his jail cell awaiting trial. I guess we will never know the truth of so many of these things.

But in every story of terrorism, people should only look at the CIA and FBI, not just to find the truth and safeguard the nation but also to ask, "Do you have something to do with this one too?"