Al-Qaeda the Database Unbound

I was searching for something on the web and chanced upon this article in www.rinf.com

In a lengthy excerpt posted on Wayne Madsen’s site, Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence, explains the origins of the word “al-Qaeda.” As previously noted by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, “al-Qaeda” has nothing to do with a terrorist organization, as the neocons and the corporate media tell us over and over, ad infinitum, but is in fact a database.

“In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements,” Bunel explains.

“It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.”

Files associated to the database were called “Q eidat il-Maaloomaat” and “Q eidat i-Taaleemaat” in Arabic. “Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’” (For More Click Here)