US commercial involvement in Algeria began in 1991, after the military coup that cancelled national elections. At the end of that year, the regime ‘opened the energy sector on liberal terms to foreign investors and operators.’ The main US firms include ‘Arco, Exxon, Oryx, Anadarko, Mobil and Sun Oil.’[14] According to European intelligence sources, CIA meetings with Algerian Islamist leaders from 1993 to 1995 are responsible for the lack of terrorist attacks on US oil and agribusiness installations in Algeria.[15] Approximately 90 per cent of Algeria’s crude oil exports go to western Europe, including Britain, where BP has a 31.8 billion pounds contract with the regime.[16]
Conclusions
The case of Algeria demonstrates that CIA-MI6 sponsored rendition and torture in Algeria cannot be understood in isolation from the dynamics of Algeria’s deep political relations with Western states, which can be explained by the economic and strategic interests that appear to inextricably bind the West and Algeria. Similar configurations of mutual interests explain the trajectories of Western security policies, including torture and rendition, in many other strategic regions in relation to the ‘War on Terror’. One of the most disturbing elements of these deep political ties is their implication for western policies toward ‘international terrorism’. The case of Algeria highlights how:
1. Western states use rendition and torture to manufacture intelligence to magnify the threat of terrorism in support of domestic and foreign security policies.
2. Western states are indirectly complicit in disturbing policies of cohabitation with radical Islamist networks, which appears to have selectively facilitated their activities.
3. This in turn has legitimized the expansion and consolidation of military-strategic control of regions considered crucial to western interests, particularly with regard to access to energy reserves and raw materials.
These three strands of policy cannot be separated, and to be challenged effectively they must be analyzed and deconstructed holistically. They are integral to a sophisticated international security system, geared to the protection of specific strategic and economic interests, that has been constructed by the US in cooperation with the UK and some EU states after 9/11, but many of whose principles were already in place well before those terrorist attacks.
This system has accelerated the criminalization of the state, resulting in a veritable crisis of corruption. In order to launch an effective and lasting challenge to western state criminal practices such as rendition, therefore, the security system itself - its structure, the key players responsible for its operation, and the corrupt interests it is designed to meet - needs to be understood, exposed and undermined.
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NOTES
[1] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (California: University of California Press, 1996) p. 8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Neil MacKay, ‘The new boom industry: Torture with CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’’, Sunday Herald (4 December 2005)
[4] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara: the Implications of US Imperialism for North & West Africa’, Review of African Political Economy (September 2004, 31 (101): 475–486), p. 491.
[5] Ambassador Cofer Black, ‘The Prevention and Combating of Terrorism in Africa’, Remarks at the Second Intergovernmental High-Level Meeting on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism In Africa, Algiers (Washington DC: US Department of State, 13 October 2004)
[6] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”’, San Francisco Chronicle (27 December 2005)
[7] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings? El Para, the Maghreb’s Bin Laden’, Le Monde Diplomatique (February 2005)
[8] For an extensive review of sources see my The War on Truth: 9/11 Disinformation, and the Anatomy of Terrorism (London: Interlink, 2005)
[9] Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Terrorist case collapses after three years’, Guardian (21 March 2000).
[10] Jason Motlag, ‘US takes terror fight to Africa’s “Wild West”,’ op. cit.
[11] Jeremy Keenan, ‘Terror in the Sahara', op. cit. Keenan reviews a wealth of evidence in excruciating detail. Also see his two other briefings which contain more extensive background analysis demonstrating a US-Algerian intelligence deception in relation to the GSPC: Keenan, ‘Americans & ‘Bad People’ in the Sahara-Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (March 2004, 31 (99): 130–9); ‘Political Destablisation and ‘Blowback’ in the Sahel’, Review of African Political Economy (December 2004, 31(102): 691–703). Look out for Keenan's forthcoming book, The Dark Sahara (London: Pluto, 2009)
[12] Salima Mellah and Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, ‘Who Staged the Tourist Kidnappings?’ op. cit.
[13] Pierre Abramovici, ‘United States: the new scramble for Africa’, Le Monde (July 2004)
[14] John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, (Pluto Press: London, 1998, pp. 205–6).
[15] Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The US and Islam (New York: Algora, 2000), pp. 182–9.
[16] ‘Algeria’, United States Energy Information Administration (February 1999)
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