Green Left Newspaper Wednesday, September 19, 2001
BY NORM DIXON
Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters."
Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?
In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the "evil empire", was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The "evil empire" was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.
How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities — the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 — bin Laden the "freedom fighter" is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a "terrorist mastermind" and an "evil-doer".
Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt — and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.
The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
Mujaheddin
In April 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country's repressive government.
The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan's relationship with the Soviet Union.
Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government's progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.
Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government's radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujaheddin, as the "contra" force was known.
Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan's leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government's fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a "national liberation" struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.
The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujaheddin captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.
Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski's grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq's own ambitions to dominate the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the "Islamic revolution" that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).
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Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West's distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury "freedom fighter". Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city — killing at least 2000 civilians — until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the mujaheddin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
In 1995, the former director of the CIA's operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: "Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets... There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan."
Made in the USA
According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American "black Muslims" were taught "sabotage skills".
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained "bin Laden's operatives" in 1989.
These "operatives" were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.
The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called "Operation Cyclone".
In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services — MAK).
MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.
Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.
The
Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA's approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was "partly culpable" for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the
Independent reported.
Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujaheddin.
The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country's pro-US royal family.
Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia's minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam's holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world's largest private construction company.
Osama bin Laden's father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business empire.
(Bin Laden junior's oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today's value of the bin Laden family net worth — estimated to be US$5 billion — by the number of bin Laden senior's sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)
Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.
Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did."
In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built "training camps", some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.
These camps, now dubbed "terrorist universities" by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.
Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism — car bombing and so on — so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate."
Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company — albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with "legitimate" business operations.
Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.
Bin Laden only became a "terrorist" in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden's anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes — such as Egypt — in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.
He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.
After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services — and thousands of his mercenaries — to the Taliban, which took power that September.
Today, bin Laden's private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.
Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.
In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying he would make "the same call again", even knowing what bin Laden would become.
"It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."
Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.
Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of "counter-terrorism operations".
Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their "work". He was in charge of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan mujaheddin for the US National Security Council.
The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
From GLW issue 465
US airforce bombs Rahesh village in northern Afghanistan, 2009. Photo from RAWA.org.
A billionaire, mass murdering criminal is dead, but the symbiotic processes of empire and terrorism that breed inequality, war, occupation, torture and dispossession are alive and well.
Thank goodness for independent media such as
Democracy Now! Today's program offers sober, historically informed commentary on the death of Osama Bin Laden, killed yesterday in a US Special Forces operation in Pakistan.
A day like today reminds us why independent media is so essential. In the hands of most of the corporate media, Bin Laden's death is detached from its historical context and treated as merely an occasion for jingoistic self-congratulation.
Speaking of which, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was
quick to issue a statement on Bin Laden's death, which included an unsubtle justification for his unpopular policy of extending Canada's war in Afghanistan.
It's utter nonsense, of course. First of all, it's worth remembering that Bin Laden and his cohort of terrorists were themselves incubated by foreign invasion, occupation and torture — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA-backed armed resistance there, the torture-chambers of a secular dictatorship in Egypt, and so forth.
These are the roots of Al-Qaeda and no one can doubt that the past decade's wars, occupations and torture have sown the seeds for new and unexpected “blowback”.
Then there's the fact that the over 100,000 foreign troops and mercenaries occupying Afghanistan have scarcely even been pretending to be chasing Al-Qaeda in that country since soon after fall 2001.
No, what the war in Afghanistan has been about for the better part of the past decade has been propping up a corrupt puppet government chalk full of warlords and drug traffickers, including many former colleagues of Osama Bin Laden.
The fundamentalist thugs in Karzai's government share Bin Laden's extreme conservatism and misogyny, but this can scarcely be mentioned since their militias kill for 'our' side.
A media that provided relevant historical context would have given us years of screaming headlines about these sordid kingpins in Karzai's government. Take, for instance, the case of
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the senior fundamentalist warlords in Afghanistan. Sayyaf is reportedly the man who first invited a rich young zealot named Osama Bin Laden to Afghanistan to join the war against the Soviet occupation.
Sayyaf literally built the future Al-Qaeda training camps with Bin Laden. For most of the past decade Sayyaf has sat as a Member of Parliament in Afghanistan supporting the NATO-backed Karzai government.
In fact, he sat in the row right in front of Afghan feminist and anti-war activist Malalai Joya; I only know this because she told me about the day in parliament when he turned around and threatened to kill her.
Joya was later thrown out of parliament for “insulting” thugs like Sayyaf, while Bin Laden's old mentor continues to enjoy his seat and all the attendant respect and privileges.
Sayyaf spends his days in a fortified mansion compound in the district of Paghman, just outside of Afghanistan's capital Kabul, not unlike the mansion outside of Pakistan's capital where Bin Laden was found and assassinated this week by the U.S.
So turn off the cable news scenes of USA-chanting-frat-party-esque revelry and take a minute to remember all the innocent victims of the murderous attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, and the victims of like-minded murderers in Bali, London, Madrid, Mumbai and beyond.
And take a moment, also, to remember the hundreds of thousands dead, the tens of thousands detained and tortured and the millions displaced in the wars (declared and undeclared) and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine and beyond -- all justified by the rhetoric of the 'war on terror'.
On a day like today we need more than vacuous media cheerleading and the facile justifications of politicians like Harper.
On a day like today we need to honour the victims of war and terrorism, and to recommit to dismantling the unjust systems that produce them.
[Originally posted at
Rabble.ca. Derrick O'Keefe is a Canadian anti-war activist and co-author, with Malalai Joya, of
Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dares to Speak Out.]
From GLW issue 878
Wikileaks proves: Afghan war unjust and unwinnable
“If the people keep identifying democracy as a system that is worst [sic] than the Taliban government, the people will support the anti-coalition forces and the security condition will degenerate”, an unnamed member of the Paktya provincial council is quoted in one of 75,000 classified US reports about the military occupation of Afghanistan published by the Wikileaks website on July 26.
Before publication, the files were shared with journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel for authentication and analysis.
Wikileaks acquired more than 91,000 reports, which they dubbed the “Afghan War Diary”. But it said it had “delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source”.
The US government reacted to the biggest military intelligence leak in history with a mixture of dismissiveness — playing down the documents by saying there was nothing “new” in them — and anger that “security” had been compromised.
US national security adviser James Jones said the publication of the documents puts the lives of soldiers and civilians at risk, ABC Online said on July 26.
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Adelaide Now on July 29 quoted US Admiral Mike Mullen saying he was “appalled” at the leak.
Yet it seems governments and the media are not appalled by the horrifying content of the reports, which detail civilians being killed and maimed; brutality and lawlessness from the occupying forces and their Afghan puppets; cover-ups; endemic corruption and wide-scale disorganisation in running the occupation effort.
Mullen said the US's strategy would not change.
The response from the Australian government has been equally dismissive. Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the defence department had simply established a task force to examine any material relating to the Australian Defence Force (ADF), the Sydney Morning Herald said on July 27.
The leaked material both confirmed previously reported attacks on civilians by the occupying forces and revealed previously undocumented incidents. It also catalogues systematic under-reporting and cover-ups of such incidents.
The July 26 Guardian said, “the logs demonstrate how much of the … US internal reporting of air strikes is simply false”.
The leaked material shone light on the secretive role of Special Forces units such as Task Force 373, who carry out targeted assassinations and kidnappings of Taliban leaders, working from a hit list of about 2000 names called the “joint prioritised effects list”.
Not only is the legality of extrajudicial executions and abductions questionable, the files show “that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path”, the Guardian said.
For example, a report on an unsuccessful attempt to capture or kill Taliban commander Qarl Ur-Rahman on June 11, 2007 said: “The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA.”
The acronyms denote that the Special Forces killed seven Afghan police and wounded four.
After seven children were killed by Task Force 373 on June 17, 2007, the occupation forces claimed to the media that the Taliban had used the children as human shields in a firefight.
However, the leaked files show the US press statements “failed to record that TF 373 had fired five rockets, destroying the madrasa and other buildings and killing seven children, before anybody had fired on them — that this looked like a mission to kill and not to capture”, the Guardian said.
“Indeed, this was clearly deliberately suppressed”
In fact, the files reveal that in this instance the US was so keen to hide the fact that the killings resulted from TF 373’s bungled attempt to assassinate an al-Qaeda operative and not, as they claimed, a chance encounter between US forces and the Taliban, that the relevant file was not to be shown even to the non-US component of the occupying forces (such as the British, Germans, Canadians and Australians).
The leaked files also show that many Afghans blame the occupation forces for bringing corruption as well as killing non-combatants.
Supporters of the war have sought to deflect attention from the revelations by criticising Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for revealing the names of Afghan informants who could be targeted by the Taliban.
Australian Defence Association executive director Neil James told the July 28 Sydney Morning Herald: “As an Australian citizen, … Assange may also be guilty of a serious criminal offence by assisting an enemy the ADF is fighting on behalf of all Australians, especially if the assistance was intentional.”
This moralising is deeply hypocritical — the very reports published by Assange detail killings and brutality performed by occupying troops and the warlord-run Afghan government they prop up.
Assange expressed doubt that any informers’ names had been revealed, pointing to the 15,000 files whose release had been delayed for that purpose and suggesting on the ABC’s Lateline on July 29 that the allegations against him were “media manipulation” by the US military.
Nothing can hide the fact that the Afghan War Diary presents a very different picture to the official version offered by the US and Australian governments.
Another revelation is that Pakistan has been supporting the Taliban's insurgency, through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and military.
Despite Pakistan being a US ally and its public support of the Afghan government for Hamid Karzai, the reports allege sections of the Pakistani military have been supplying the Taliban with funding, safe-havens and logistical support.
Pakistan has denied the accusations. Former ISI head Hamid Gul said the leak was part of a US plot to remove itself from the war, the Washington Post said on July 28. However, these denials belie Pakistan's real interests in having a friendly force ruling Afghanistan.
Amin Saikal, professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, said on the ABC Drum website on July 28 that, recognising that the US was losing and would eventually leave, the ISI and Pakistani military are backing the Taliban to ensure Afghanistan would “not fall into the hands of any group which may not be receptive or subordinate to Pakistan's regional interests”.
Links between the Taliban and the ISI go back to the Taliban's origins in early 1990s. Indeed, the ISI created the Taliban with CIA approval.
The Afghan War Diary provides an insight into the day-to-day conditions of the war, leaving the idea that this is a “good war” in tatters. Thanks to Wikileaks, justifying the continuation of this war just got a lot harder.
From GLW issue 847
Why are the British and US governments saying the leak of military documents about Afghanistan has "put our soldiers at risk"? It's us who have been kept hidden from this information, not the Taliban. For example, many of the revelations are previously hidden details of civilian casualties, but Afghans in those areas probably already knew about those deaths.
I don't suppose local insurgents have said: "Well well, I've read the leaked documents, and you know that family whose house was bombed to rubble by an American plane, and the rest of the village arrived and wailed for three days and swore revenge and then there was a funeral that we all went to? Well, it turns out they're dead."
One typical story in the documents tells how in March 2007, following an explosion, marines opened fire with automatic weapons as they drove down a six-mile stretch of road, killing 19 civilians including teenage girls in fields, motorists and an old man. But when they made a military report on the episode, they wrote that after the explosion the "patrol returned to base".
This was accurate, as far as it went. It just missed out the details in between. But I suppose with all the excitement of returning to base you can easily forget the other bit of the afternoon, where you shot up half the neighbourhood.
In any case, those forms are so complicated, who wouldn't miss out on all that box-ticking after a tiring day.
Other documents reveal details of attempts to win over the locals. So one says: "The village of Mamadi is definitely anti-coalition. They want nothing to do with us."
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There are similar accounts, but then an endearingly optimistic report about a visit to a school in Nuristan, that says: "They were very friendly and wanted to talk to us. Some of them threw rocks at the soldiers, but it all appeared to be in good fun."
So it seems the soldiers experienced the traditional friendly Nuristan greeting of rock-hurling. Because as anyone knows, the time to worry in Nuristan is when you say hello and they don't sling a rock at you, then you know you've offended them. But when they see you coming and immediately roll a boulder at your head you're practically family.
Another objection to the leaks is even more unlikely — that the information is irrelevant because it concerns events of a few years ago, before these problems were sorted out.
Indeed, some of these accounts of civilian casualties took place way back in the olden days of 2008, when the war was in its infancy, barely seven years old. And as any military expert knows there are always teething troubles in any war for the first seven years, until year eight when matters suddenly sort themselves out and get settled.
So the main attack has been the traditional one with a leak, to ignore the lies, disasters and deaths revealed, and instead become furious at whoever exposed it all. If you report a murder to the police, you wouldn't expect to turn on the news later and hear: "The police have said they'll do all they can to catch the sick individual who revealed there had been a murder."
If things were going well, they probably wouldn't mind leaks detailing levels of corruption. Unless they said: "Ooh, it had all come together so well it looks like we'll be finished by September, with democracy and all the warlords doing community service, and we were going to announce it as a nice surprise and now you've spoilt it, Wikileaks."
Instead, the documents reveal the Taliban's weaponry is greater than admitted, and the Afghan army is riddled with corruption and victory seems unlikely, far from the official declarations that it's all going to plan.
Secrets are essential, not because of the danger when information gets to insurgents, but because of the danger when information gets to us. For we might conclude that having an army in Afghanistan, for no coherent reason, appears to putting the soldiers and the Afghans at a certain amount of risk.
[First published in the British Independent on July 28]
From GLW issue 847
On July 26, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented.
In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday in Ireland and Basra in Iraq, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name.
Wikileaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times are a fraction.
There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”.
In Washington, I interviewed a senior defence department official and asked: “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?”
He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower.
In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks.
The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.
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On 31 July, the US celebrity reporter Christiane Amanapour interviewed US defence secretary Robert Gates on the ABC network. She invited Gates to describe to her viewers his “anger” at Wikileaks.
She echoed the Pentagon line that “this leak has blood on its hands”, thereby cueing Gates to find Wikileaks “guilty” of “moral culpability”.
Such hypocrisy coming from a regime drenched in the blood of the people of Afghanistan and Iraq — as its own files make clear — is apparently not for journalistic enquiry. This is hardly surprising now that a new and fearless form of public accountability, which Wikileaks represents, threatens not only the war-makers but their apologists.
Their current propaganda is that Wikileaks is “irresponsible”. Earlier this year, before it released the cockpit video of a US Apache gunship killing 19 civilians in Iraq, including journalists and children, Wikileaks sent people to Baghdad to find the families of the victims in order to prepare them.
Prior to the release of the Afghan War Logs in July, Wikileaks wrote to the White House asking that it identify names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply.
More than 15,000 files were withheld and these, says Assange, will not be released until they have been scrutinised “line by line” so that names of those at risk can be deleted.
The pressure on Assange himself seems unrelenting. In his homeland, Australia, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has said that if her right-wing coalition won the August 21 federal elections, “appropriate action” will be taken “if an Australian citizen has deliberately undertake an activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way”.
The Australian role in Afghanistan, effectively mercenary in the service of Washington, has produced two striking results: the massacre of five children in a village in Oruzgan province and the overwhelming disapproval of the majority of Australians.
Last May, following the release of the Apache footage, Assange had his Australian passport temporarily confiscated when he returned home. The Labor government in Canberra denied it received requests from Washington to detain him and spy on the Wikileaks network.
The British government also denies this. They would, wouldn’t they? Assange, who came to London in July to work on exposing the war logs, has had to leave Britain hastily for, as he puts it, “safer climes”.
On August 16, the Guardian, citing US Vietnam War-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, described the great Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu as “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear age”.
Vanunu, who alerted the world to Israel’s secret nuclear weapons, was kidnapped by the Israelis and incarcerated for 18 years after he was left unprotected by the London Sunday Times, which had published the documents he supplied.
In 1983, another heroic whistleblower, Sarah Tisdall, a British foreign office clerical worker, sent documents to the Guardian that disclosed how the Thatcher government planned to spin the arrival of US cruise missiles in Britain. The Guardian complied with a court order to hand over the documents, and Tisdall went to prison.
In one sense, the Wikileaks revelations shame the dominant section of journalism devoted merely to taking down what cynical and malign power tells it. This is state stenography, not journalism.
Look on the Wikileaks site and read a British defence ministry document that describes the “threat” of real journalism. And so it should be a threat. Having published skilfully the Wikileaks expose of a fraudulent war, the Guardian should now give its most powerful and unreserved editorial support to the protection of Assange and his colleagues, whose truth-telling is as important as any in my lifetime.
I like Assange’s dust-dry wit. When I asked him if it was more difficult to publish secret information in Britain, he replied: “When we look at Official Secrets Act labelled documents we see that they state it is an offence to retain the information and an offence to destroy the information. So the only possible outcome we have is to publish the information.”
From GLW issue 850
Statement from the Socialist Alliance National Executive October 8, 2010
On October 17, 2001 the Howard Coalition government deployed Australian troops to Afghanistan, just nine days after the US had begun bombing one of the most poverty stricken and war weary nations on earth.
The then newly-formed Socialist Alliance responded to this attack and its reputed catalyst, the terrorist bombings on New York and Washington some weeks earlier, by noting the US' hypocrisy and pledging to campaign against Bush's “war without end”.
“We are ready to play a part in mobilising the broadest possible opposition to any attempt by US policies and their global allies to use the tragedy as a pretext for military aggression”, we said.
Since then, the Socialist Alliance has maintained its opposition to Australia's commitment to the US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan. We have continued to seek out ways of building community opposition to this (and the Iraq) wars – an opening which could become greater when federal parliament starts its debate.
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This October marks the 10th year since the US and its allies including Australia invaded Afghanistan. The bombing of the poorest country in the world by some of the richest is a crime against humanity. The real purpose of this crime is to further US power in the region.
Its initial legal justification has been called into question since the US and the UK's use of United Nations Article 51 precludes any self-defence which continues after an attack.
Furthermore, the right of self-defence relates to attacks by other nation states, not criminal activity, such as terrorism.
Despite what Western leaders have claimed, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan did not sponsor the 9/11 attacks. While the Al-Qaeda leadership was based in Afghanistan, the terrorists who carried out the attacks (none of whom were Afghan) were residents of Germany and the US. Recent reports even suggest that the Taliban may have attempted to warn of the 9/11 attacks and curtail the activities of Al-Qaeda.
Ironically, the US has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism against Afghanistan since the 1970s. Al-Qaeda is a US-created terrorist outfit that went rogue.
Afghanistan has been called "the graveyard of empires". Historically, insurgent groups in Afghanistan have defeated all invaders. The same will happen with the current war - the longest for Australia since Vietnam.
The Taliban is part of the blow back of the Russian war in Afghanistan. Even Hilary Clinton admits it was one of the jihadist groups which, as allies, was “emboldened trained and equipped” and not deemed a security risk to the US or its allies.
Taliban expansion will continue, often with complicity of the people as a result of their increasing disgust with the brutal and corrupt Kabul government, the rising civilian deaths from the US-led forces, particularly though air strikes and their own dispossession and hopelessness.
Al Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan does not pose as great a threat to the Afghan people as does the suffering caused by the occupiers, or the constant bombings by unmanned predator drones launched from bases in the US.
Al’Qaeda has greatly reduced numbers in Afghanistan. In a June interview on US ABC TV, CIA chief Leon Panetta estimated the number of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan as “at most … 50-100”.
Insurgent groups continue to form to fight the occupying armies support for the corrupt Hamid Karzai government, lawless warlords and their connection to the venal Pakistani Intelligence Agency. (See the Wikileak Afghanistan War Diaries for more evidence of this.)
The indomitable Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) attribute the current rise in fundamentalism, lawlessness, poverty and rape directly to the occupation. Besieged by extreme weather, in a country whose infrastructure has been smashed by conflict, many Afghan people have few chances of surviving over the age of 43 years.
Apologists for Australian troops remaining in Afghanistan claim they are there to “finish the job”. This, apparently, entails training the Afghan army and police so that it can maintain the corrupt and drug-lord linked government of President Hamid Karzai, which was installed undemocratically by the US and allied invaders. This dubious "job" may never be finished.
The Karzai regime is protected by foreign troops and private mercenaries rather than by the ragged Afghan army or police. These forces are either the private warlord militias (in new uniforms) or people looking for some pay to feed their families. Many desert. Others shoot their “mentors”.
Rosy views of Australia’s involvement as assisting the Afghan people are now being challenged by the September decision to court martial members of Australian Special Operations Task Group for the murder of two adults and four children near the village of Sarmorghab in Oruzgan province in 2009.
Labor and the Coalition insist that Australia's national security is at stake if the troops are withdrawn. But Afghanistan has never threatened Australia.
However, protracted Western wars of aggression, occupation and terror against poor Muslim nations like Afghanistan will continue to provoke the level of resentment that can lead to terrorism by groups and individuals in many countries.
These wars are acts of sustained state terror, which are provoking acts terror of in response. This is why defence commentators admit that the troop surge and endless war of occupation is not only helping to destabilise Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is a threat to global security.
Life for Afghan women, whom supporters of the war claim to want to protect, continues to deteriorate in Taliban and non-Taliban areas. Kazai has made it legal for husbands to rape their wives, and recent reports indicate a rising number of attempts at self-immolation.
A UN report “Trends in Maternal Mortality” indicates that after nearly a decade of donor funded health projects, there has only been a marginal reduction in maternal and child mortality.
Last year, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ranked Afghanistan the worst of 202 countries in terms of maternal, infant and child mortality.
We must force the Australian government to withdraw the troops. Currently 61% of Australians want the troops brought back. The views of most Australians should not be ignored for the sake of the US-Australia Alliance.
Australia should not walk away from this war ravaged country. The Gillard government should provide funding and assistance to the people of Afghanistan (not the corrupt bureaucrats – Afghan or Western). War reparations would allow the Afghan people to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
Australia must also open its doors to those Afghan refugees who want to come here. This is the least this country can do after having helped create mass dislocation and displacement.
Finally, politicians must cease politically manipulating this ongoing tragedy. The debate – which the ALP has been forced to have – must extend well beyond parliament. It will not be a debate if, as PM Julia Gillard wants, it is framed within a call for “support for the troops”.
The purpose of framing the “debate” this way is to use blind and misplaced nationalist sentiment in an effort to silence any argument that exposes the Australian and other foreign military intervention in Afghanistan as the criminal and anti-people war that it really is.
It’s time for the silent majority to make their views known, and force an end to this bipartisan madness in which tens of thousands, if not more, have been killed for no good reason.
For more media comment contact Pip Hinman 0412139968.
From GLW issue 855
What is OSAMA BIN LADEN CIA AGENT 1980 SNOPES?
posted 16 August, 2006 07:41 AM
NEW YORK (CNN) -- CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen says the notion that Osama bin Laden once worked for the CIA is "simply a folk myth" and that there's no shred of evidence to support such theories.
quote:
Q: If it's true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn't still?
Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada
BERGEN: This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA -- that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden -- is simply a folk myth. There's no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn't have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn't have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn't really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
Hopefully, this will help silence some of the many loonies who still believe this UL.
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"Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide." - Jerry Pournelle
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tootiredtocare
Deck the Malls
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 posted 16 August, 2006 02:36 PM
Hehe of course the CIA would deny it since it reflects badly on them. The thing is the Bin Laden's were major people in the Arab world the Bush family did a lot of business with them and so did numerous goverment agencies including the CIA.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/etc/cron.html shows that he was known prior to 1996. He is thought to have been involved in Somalia for instance in 1993 in an attack in which 18 US troops were killed.
Sorry but many reports do show that the federal goverment was aware of him and his group.
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DesertRat
It Came Upon a Midnight Clearance
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posted 16 August, 2006 03:24 PM
TTTC, I don't know why I even bother, but you do know the difference between "AWARENESS OF THE EXISTENCE of a person" and "TANGIBLE FINANCIAL, MATERIAL, AND POLITICAL SUPPORT of said person," right?
*sigh*
Probably not.
Look... I'm AWARE that you exist. Does that automatically mean I'm sending you money and arms and supporting YOUR agenda?
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High on the wind, the Highland drums begin to roll, and something from the past just comes and stares into my soul... --Mark Knopfler
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tootiredtocare
Deck the Malls
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posted 16 August, 2006 03:48 PM
We supported the Pakinstanis who supported many of the people that went into Bin Laden's camp. We also supported the Bin Laden group in many legal ventures and no doubt many CIA/Defense Department sponsored ventures. We did indeed politically support his group and other such groups when they were fighting against the Soviets.
Like it or not we did setup a lot of the backlash against us.
There are quite a few substantial links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden's stretching back quite a while. It even ties into financing of Bin Laden's anti-Soviet group.
Ever hear of James R. Bath or the Caryle Group?
It's odd but prior to now the CIA did say he was asset. That he was used and supported by them.
I suggest you consider why the change in tone these past few years regarding Osama.
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pinqy
Ding Dong! Merrily on High Definition TV
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posted 16 August, 2006 05:33 PM
quote:
Originally posted by tootiredtocare:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/etc/cron.html shows that he was known prior to 1996. He is thought to have been involved in Somalia for instance in 1993 in an attack in which 18 US troops were killed.
No, that doesn't show that he was known prior to 1996. All it shows is that, in 1998, the US believed that the 1992 bombing in Yemen was bin Laden's first attack and that in 1999 the US believed he was part of the 1993 attacks in Somalia. You're showing post-1996 sources. That doesn't mean they knew or suspected any of this at the time of the attacks, just that by 1998/99 they knew.
quote:
It's odd but prior to now the CIA did say he was asset. That he was used and supported by them.
I'd like to see you back up that claim.
pinqy
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Don't Forget!
Winter Solstice Hanukkah Christmas Kwanzaa & Gurnenthar's Ascendance Are Coming!
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First of Two
The Bills of St. Mary's
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posted 16 August, 2006 10:58 PM
quote:
Originally posted by tootiredtocare:
Hehe of course the CIA would deny it since it reflects badly on them.
Apparently, you can't tell the difference between the CIA and CNN. Is this because you're paranoid, or merely because you're a simpleton?
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"Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide." - Jerry Pournelle
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Ophiuchus
Deck the Malls
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posted 16 August, 2006 11:55 PM
The CIA supported the Taliban due to insane paranoid anti-communist thinking...
Whether that translate to Bin Laden specifically isn't so clear. But, Bush probably does have ties to the Bin Laden family, but Osama sort of rejected his family in support of his family's enemies long ago.
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First of Two
The Bills of St. Mary's
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posted 17 August, 2006 12:24 AM
Dang, how'd I miss that tttc had a clone?
The Soviet regime in Afghanistan was overthrown in 1992. The Taliban didn't exist as a significant group until 1994.
The other main weakness to the "US supporting Taliban" scenario is that the scenario would ammear much more likely if the US had actually recognized the Taliban instead of militating for the world not to recognize them.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your insane paranoid rant.
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"Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for western civilization as it commits suicide." - Jerry Pournelle
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Salamander
Happy Xmas (Warranty Is Over)
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posted 17 August, 2006 09:13 AM
quote:
Originally posted by First of Two:
Dang, how'd I miss that tttc had a clone?
The Soviet regime in Afghanistan was overthrown in 1992. The Taliban didn't exist as a significant group until 1994.
The other main weakness to the "US supporting Taliban" scenario is that the scenario would ammear much more likely if the US had actually recognized the Taliban instead of militating for the world not to recognize them.
But don't let the facts get in the way of your insane paranoid rant.
I think the "US funded the Taliban" while incorrect is not totally off the mark.
From my understanding, the CIA was involved (along with other intelligence agencies) in supplying factions within Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. It would not be impossible to think that some of these CIA trained/equipped Afghanis would end up being involved with the Taliban.
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"victory thru self-deception"
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DesertRat
It Came Upon a Midnight Clearance
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posted 19 August, 2006 12:16 AM
Haven't you all learned by now TTTC's tactics? Throw out an absurd arguement with pathetically little source justification... and when called to account on it, rather than respond on that issue, fabricate another one. That way, he maintains the initiative in an arguement, he doesn't have to respond to the attacks on his credability, and it puts everyone else on the defensive.
Well, hogwash, I say.
quote:
I think the "US funded the Taliban" while incorrect is not totally off the mark.
From my understanding, the CIA was involved (along with other intelligence agencies) in supplying factions within Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. It would not be impossible to think that some of these CIA trained/equipped Afghanis would end up being involved with the Taliban.
You are absolutely, 100% correct. Some of the muj we trained in the 1980s now doubt ended up in Taliban camps, as did some of the weapons.
There is a huge gulf, however, between that and saying we sponsored and supported the Taliban, as TTTC asserts.
Now, pardon while I take TTTC's and Ophiucus' arguements apart piece by piece.
quote:
The CIA supported the Taliban due to insane paranoid anti-communist thinking...
Nonsense. As FoT already pointed out, the Soviet Union had withdrawn from Afghanistan long before the concept of the Taliban even existed. The CIA supported the mujahedin in the 1980s; they NEVER supported the Taliban.
There are those who argue that the muj and the Taliban are one and the same; that is a gross mistatement. While there has no doubt been some spillover, as Publius points out in this thread, nothing could be further than the truth. I'll quote him:
quote:
Few Taliban were veterans of the war against the Soviets. Most were simply too young: they were students in the Pakistani madaris when the earliest Taliban cadres recruited them, after all. Even those that were old enough were stuck in a theater of the war that was chronically shortchanged by ISI when it came time to pass out the resources given to Pakistan by the CIA. Almost all of the aid that the Pakistanis did dole out in southern Afghanistan went to longtime Taliban rival Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, until the Pakistanis reversed their position and began sponsoring the Taliban big time in 1994.
By that time, of course, most of the real veterans of the Soviet war were fighting for the warlords in Kabul and the CIA had stopped writing blank checks to Pakistani ISI. The idea that the US put the Taliban in power has more irony to it than truth.
quote:
We supported the Pakinstanis who supported many of the people that went into Bin Laden's camp. We also supported the Bin Laden group in many legal ventures and no doubt many CIA/Defense Department sponsored ventures. We did indeed politically support his group and other such groups when they were fighting against the Soviets.
Yes, we did support the Pakistanis, and several other countries in the region. But their relationship with the Taliban was a non-issue to our support for them. Saying that in supporting Pakistan on and off over the last several decades, we were rendering deliberate and tangible support to the Taliban is absurd and fallacious.
quote:
Like it or not we did setup a lot of the backlash against us.
I don't disagree with this, but it was far from deliberate or intentional.
quote:
There are quite a few substantial links between the Bush family and the Bin Laden's stretching back quite a while. It even ties into financing of Bin Laden's anti-Soviet group.
Ever hear of James R. Bath or the Caryle Group?
There are a number of links between the US oil industry and the Bin Laden family... prior to the late 1990s, the Bin Laden name was renowned as one of the most powerful business ventures in the Arabian Peninsula, not as the moniker of a master terrorist. Though I do not dispute the shadiness of the ICCC's (and most of big oil's) financial dealings in the Middle East, there is absolutely ZERO evidence to support or even suggest that any of this translates to direct US Government support of Bin Laden or the Taliban (nor is there any proof that Bath was at all affiliated with the CIA.)
quote:
t's odd but prior to now the CIA did say he was asset. That he was used and supported by them.
To echo Pinqy, I'd like to see some evidence behind that. And just this once, try making sure your cite actually supports your claim.
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High on the wind, the Highland drums begin to roll, and something from the past just comes and stares into my soul... --Mark Knopfler
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educatedindian
I Saw Three Shipments
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posted 21 August, 2006 11:49 PM
Oh brother. I can't believe anyone is seriously debating this, based on the very FIRST I've ever seen of the CIA's own less than credible denials.
Next time, try taking a look. The evidence for this isn't exactly suffering from a shortage of sources. Denying this is right up there with claiming WMDs in Iraq were the reason for the war.
Deny, if you can, half a dozen journalists, military experts like Jane's, and a Congressional report. And then ask yourselves, why you were so naive as to take seriously CIA denials?
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1998/08/acovfri.htm
USA Today 21 August 1998
"Ironically, bin-Laden started out on the same side as the United States. In 1979 he supported the Afgan mujadheddin guerrillas in their battle against the occupying Soviet Union.
They were supported by U.S. money, arms and CIA training in the Cold War battle for global influence. Bin Laden learned skills that would help him in the terrorist trade. According to an upcoming Congressional Research Service report, bin Laden gained "prominence during the Afghan war for his role in the recruitment, training and transportation of Arab nationals."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,551971,00.html
"Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan, as did Pakistan's intelligence generals.
Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in Brooklyn [New York, U.S.A.], were both protégés of Abdullah Azzam. A formative influence on bin Laden, the charismatic Azzam was killed in a car-bomb in 1987: according to some rumours he was killed by the CIA. Others claim he was himself a CIA agent.
At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills. Passed down to the younger jihad generation which filled the ranks of the Bin Laden organisation, these skills would come back to haunt the United States."
http://www.janes.com/regional_news/americas/news/jdw/jdw010914_1_n.shtml
"Osama bin Laden was one of many US beneficiaries in its war against Moscow. He spent years in the mid-1980s travelling widely to raise funds and recruit thousands of Muslim youths to fight the Soviets.
The rise of Al-Qaeda
In 1988, with US knowledge, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda (The Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells in countries spread across at least 26 countries."
http://www.publicintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=293
"Osama Bin Laden: How the U.S. Helped Midwife a Terrorist
By Ahmed Rashid
LAHORE, Pakistan, September 13, 2001 — Ahmed Rashid of Pakistan is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Center for Public Integrity. He is the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Daily Telegraph of London. This is an excerpt from his book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (Yale University Press).
Among these thousands of foreign recruits was a young Saudi student, Osama Bin Laden, the son of a Yemeni construction magnate, Mohammed Bin Laden, who was a close friend of the late King Faisal and whose company had become fabulously wealthy on the contracts to renovate and expand the Holy Mosques of Mecca and Medina. The ISI had long wanted Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, to provide a Royal Prince to lead the Saudi contingent in order to show Muslims the commitment of the Royal Family to the jihad. Only poorer Saudis, students, taxi drivers and Bedouin tribesmen had so far arrived to fight. But no pampered Saudi prince was ready to rough it out in the Afghan mountains. Bin Laden, although not a royal, was close enough to the royals and certainly wealthy enough to lead the Saudi contingent. Bin Laden, Prince Turki and [Lieutenant] General [Hameed] Gul [head of the ISI] were to become firm friends and allies in a common cause. The centre for the Arab-Afghans [Filipino Moros, Uzbeks from Soviet Central Asia, Arabs from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and Uighurs from Xinjiang in China who had all come to fight with the Mujaheddin] was the offices of the World Muslim League and the Muslim Brotherhood in the northern Pakistan city of Peshawar. The centre was run by Abdullah Azam, a Jordanian Palestinian whom Bin Laden had first met at university in Jeddah and revered as his leader. Azam and his two sons were assassinated by a bomb blast in Peshawar in 1989.
During the 1980s, Azam had forged close links with Hikmetyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, the Afghan Islamic scholar, whom the Saudis had sent to Peshawar to promote Wahabbism. Saudi funds flowed to Azam and the Makhtab at Khidmat or Services Center, which he created in 1984 to service the new recruits and receive donations from Islamic charities. Donations from Saudi Intelligence, the Saudi Red Crescent, the World Muslim League and private donations from Saudi princes and mosques were channelled through the Makhtab. A decade later, the Makhtab would emerge at the center of a web of radical organizations that helped carry out the World Trade Center bombing and the bombings of US embassies in Africa in 1998....
His father backed the Afghan struggle and helped fund it, so when Bin Laden decided to join up, his family responded enthusiastically. He first traveled to Peshawar in 1980 and met the Mujaheddin leaders, returning frequently with Saudi donations for the cause until 1982, when he decided to settle in Peshawar. He brought in his company engineers and heavy construction equipment to help build roads and depots for the Mujaheddin. In 1986, he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical center for the Mujaheddin, deep under the mountains close to the Pakistan border."
Posts: 69 | From: Texas | Registered: Aug 2006 | IP: Logged | |
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Salamander
Happy Xmas (Warranty Is Over)
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posted 22 August, 2006 06:21 AM
quote:
Originally posted by educatedindian:
Oh brother. I can't believe anyone is seriously debating this, based on the very FIRST I've ever seen of the CIA's own less than credible denials.
Next time, try taking a look. The evidence for this isn't exactly suffering from a shortage of sources. Denying this is right up there with claiming WMDs in Iraq were the reason for the war.
Nothing you quoted shows that the CIA trained or funded Osama.
The quotes show the CIA knew of Osama, they show that the CIA did fund/train the same Mujaheddin that Osama funded. Show me where it states that the CIA specifically funded and/or trained Osama.
Also, the USA has never supported the Taliban. As I discussed, it is entirely possible (even probable) that CIA-trained Mujaheddin ended up in the Taliban. This does not mean that there was any endorsement of the Taliban.
ETA:
DR, I agree that there is a massive difference between funding/training the Mujaheddin during the Soviet invasion and supporting the Taliban. My purpose was to clarify for the conspiracy theorists that there was a degree of separation between the concept of "CIA funds Afghanis" and "CIA funds the Taliban".
ETA 2: Besides, I watched all of Rambo III and Rambo never once encountered Osama so I figure the US can't possible have funded the guy
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"victory thru self-deception"
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educatedindian
I Saw Three Shipments
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posted 22 August, 2006 05:00 PM
"Nothing you quoted shows that the CIA trained or funded Osama. The quotes show the CIA knew of Osama, they show that the CIA did fund/train the same Mujaheddin that Osama funded. Show me where it states that the CIA specifically funded and/or trained Osama. Also, the USA has never supported the Taliban."
Salamander needs help with his basic reading skills.
I don't care about the little side issue of the Taliban. In fact I never said a word about it, or quoted anyone saying anything about it.
Reread the quotes. EVERY single article directly states the CIA not only knew about him. Most state they trained him or funded him. Several even state the specific agent who trained him.
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Freshman
We Three Blings
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posted 22 August, 2006 07:03 PM
quote:
Originally posted by educatedindian:
"Nothing you quoted shows that the CIA trained or funded Osama. The quotes show the CIA knew of Osama, they show that the CIA did fund/train the same Mujaheddin that Osama funded. Show me where it states that the CIA specifically funded and/or trained Osama. Also, the USA has never supported the Taliban."
Salamander needs help with his basic reading skills.
I don't care about the little side issue of the Taliban. In fact I never said a word about it, or quoted anyone saying anything about it.
Reread the quotes. EVERY single article directly states the CIA not only knew about him. Most state they trained him or funded him. Several even state the specific agent who trained him.
what if he does and comes to the same conclusion? If you weren't so condescending, maybe you'd get your opinion across.
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"High-Five!" - Borat
Posts: 1056 | From: Racine, WI | Registered: Jun 2006 | IP: Logged | |
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James D
Deck the Malls
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posted 23 August, 2006 12:53 AM
From the CIA itself. (I cannot link directly to the document, nor cut and paste from it as it is a scanned document, but it can be found on the CIA freedom of information act website here, under the title INTERNATIONAL CRIME THREAT ASSESSMENT created 12/1/2000.
From pages 16-17 of the publication (and page 19-20 of the file containing the publication).
quote:
Islamic terrorist groups with vague international agendas have been a growing threat in recent years. These groups are sometimes loosely, sometimes draw their membership from communities in several different countries, and obtain support from an informal international network of like minded extremists rather than state-sponsors of terrorism. Many of these terrorists met while fighting against the Soviets in Afganistan or have since recieved millitary and explosives training there.
* The group led by Razmi Yosef, the convicted mastermind behind the world trade center bombing [ed. note - refers to the 1992 bombing], and the network maintained by Afghan terrorist Usoma Bin Laden are prime examples of this evolution of the international terrorist threat
Though it is no smoking gun that we trained Bin Laden specificly, there is clearly a fair amount of blowback in that many of the mujahadeen that we supported during the Soviet invasion of Afganistan may have sown the seeds of the Taliban who came to power after the colapse of the soviet empire.
Of course, we have supported other tyrants in the past (Saddam comes to mind, but as we all know - there was no connection between Saddam and the Taliban nor bin laden.), so it should come as no suprise that sometimes we do create (or at least feed) monsters who come back to bite us.
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The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - )
Posts: 244 | From: Ventura, CA | Registered: Sep 2005 | IP: Logged | |
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Salamander
Happy Xmas (Warranty Is Over)
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posted 23 August, 2006 01:17 AM
quote:
Originally posted by educatedindian:
"Nothing you quoted shows that the CIA trained or funded Osama. The quotes show the CIA knew of Osama, they show that the CIA did fund/train the same Mujaheddin that Osama funded. Show me where it states that the CIA specifically funded and/or trained Osama. Also, the USA has never supported the Taliban."
Salamander needs help with his basic reading skills.
I don't care about the little side issue of the Taliban. In fact I never said a word about it, or quoted anyone saying anything about it.
Reread the quotes. EVERY single article directly states the CIA not only knew about him. Most state they trained him or funded him. Several even state the specific agent who trained him.
Childishness aside, I worked under the assumption that you quoted the most damning paragraphs from your cites. Therefore I took it that if those quoted passages from your cites did not show a link then neither would the rest of the articles you cited.
Let me repeat myself, nothing that you have quoted in your original post demonstrates a link between Osama & the CIA. The first quote you gave shows that Osama and the CIA supported Afghani mujadheddin. It does not say the CIA supported Osama. It does not say Osama received his training from the CIA.
Your second quote refers to giving Osama "free rein"... which simply means the CIA did not interfere with Osama's actions in any way. Then it goes on to show that Azzam (who was not Osama) was killed and that there was suspicion that he was either killed by the CIA or was CIA himself. Yet, beyond speculation it really doesn't confirm anything in that regard.
The next quote (from Janes) states that Osama bin Laden was "one of many" beneficiaries from the war against Moscow. Note that it doesn't specifically state "funded by CIA" or "trained by CIA"... his benefit may have been from having CIA-trained mujadheddin joining his ranks.
The next one is about Osama forming Al Qaeda -- again, it states the US knew about it. Knowing about it is vastly different from endorsing or funding something.
Of the very lengthy final quote, the only reference to Osama and the CIA is that he helped build the Khost tunnel complex which the CIA was funding. Note that it says Osama's company helped... which to my terribly poor reading skills, suggests that he was not alone in working on building the tunnels.
Again, to my miserable reading comprehension, this means that the CIA was funding whichever companies were working on the complex and one of those happened to be a construction company run by Osama. The complex was built as a centre for the mujaheddin, which Osama never was.
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"victory thru self-deception"
Posts: 2211 | From: Western Australia | Registered: Jun 2005 | IP: Logged | |
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Silas Sparkhammer
I Saw V-Chips Come Sailing In
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posted 23 August, 2006 01:22 AM
quote:
Originally posted by educatedindian:
Salamander needs help with his basic reading skills.
I've rarely met a person who is less in need of remedial reading classes than Salamander. He's a darned good writer, too.
quote:
Reread the quotes. EVERY single article directly states the CIA not only knew about him. Most state they trained him or funded him. Several even state the specific agent who trained him.
I thought Osama bin Lader was a multi-millionaire in his own right. Why would he need the CIA to fund him? If I understand affairs correctly, he himself was funding Mujaheddin units.
It is, however, likely that the CIA was cooperating with him, selling weaponry to his units, giving information to his intelligence units, etc.
I see OBL as very similar to Theodore Roosevelt in the Spanish American War: he used his family money to equip a unit which he then led, but his skills were more organizational and financial than military.
Silas
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Salamander
Happy Xmas (Warranty Is Over)
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posted 23 August, 2006 02:20 AM
Talk about an "awwww... shucks" moment. If it weren't for the fact that you were complimenting me Silas, I might've felt the need to argue against the "darned good writer" bit
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"victory thru self-deception"
Posts: 2211 | From: Western Australia | Registered: Jun 2005 | IP: Logged | |
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Freshman
We Three Blings
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posted 23 August, 2006 09:45 PM
Educatedndian's not the only one who beleives the U.S. supported the taliban: Moby also thinks we brought the Taliban,etc. to power and says the CIA set up and funded a training base where Al Quida members train at during the cold war: http://www.moby.com/journal
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"High-Five!" - Borat
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EthanMitchell
Deck the Malls
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posted 23 August, 2006 11:15 PM
I think that part of the larger problem here is that the anti-"anti-American"-ists would like to reduce a fairly complex cloud of foreign policy criticisms to a single straw man: Osama was on payroll from the CIA, here's his W-4.
There are probably people saying that, but there are also people saying that NASA faked the comet Hale-Bopp. This should not be used to distract from a serious criticism, like whether or not NASA is a good use of public funds.
The serious conversation here is whether or not US foreign policy in the Middle East has been an actual expression of our national interests, or whether or not it has been subordinated to short-sighted goals of a certain power elite. And the facts at hand are:
*The US supported the muj against the Soviets in a long and bitter war.
*The immense social and infrastructure costs of the war, and the power vested in fanatic ideologues, helped give rise to the Taliban (domestically) who created a climate hospitable to international terrorism.
*Having met our short-term objectives in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, the US more or less withdrew from active involvement in that country, and thus allowed the Taliban to be created.
The "anti-Americanist" point here is not that we are guilty, or culpable, or evil, or whatever. It is that some of our problems in 2006 could have been reasonably anticipated--and in fact, *were* anticipated--as possible results of our policy back in 1980. We can't fix that, but hopefully we can learn from it.
Unfortunately, I see very little evidence that we are learning from it. Right now, it is considered more or less unpatriotic to suggest that the Iraq War is creating a social trajectory in the region anathema to US interests.
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Seraphina
Deck the Malls
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posted 23 August, 2006 11:37 PM
The Afghanistan war did not start by the Soviet occupation. It was originally an uprising of radical Muslims against the secular government, which was trying to implement such controversial policies as equal opportunities for woman. Unfortunately, it was aligned with the Soviet Union, which send in troops to help prop up the government. USA started to arm and train the mujahadeen for no other reason than to help the USSR’s enemy. During this conflict large number of small children were orphaned and many were sent to schools run by fanatical Muslims which brought them up to be also fanatical Muslims. These children grew up and became Taliban.
During the war Osama would have been quite a prominent person in Afghanistan. Somehow I cannot imagine Saudi multimillionaire constructing roads and funding all sort of things would not stand out of the crowd. He would have been very well known to the CIA, and if they did not deal with him, I would have to wonder why?
Posts: 214 | From: Melbourne, Australia | Registered: Oct 2005 | IP: Logged | |
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Ganzfeld
Let There Be PCs on Earth
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posted 23 August, 2006 11:57 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Seraphina:
During the war Osama would have been quite a prominent person in Afghanistan. Somehow I cannot imagine Saudi multimillionaire constructing roads and funding all sort of things would not stand out of the crowd. He would have been very well known to the CIA, and if they did not deal with him, I would have to wonder why?
During the war Osama was one of many foreigners who were at best considered a nuisance. He used his experience to tell tall tales of his exploits back home and that eventually made him a celebrity there but in Afghanistan he was a real nobody. (It wasn't until much later that he was even known there.) I'd like to know the answer to the opposite question: Why would the CIA deal with a rich brat who went to Afghanistan looking to be a martyr but didn't really do much but get in the way?
Posts: 4922 | From: Kyoto, Japan | Registered: Sep 2005 | IP: Logged | |
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DesertRat
It Came Upon a Midnight Clearance
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posted 26 August, 2006 01:39 AM
quote:
The Afghanistan war did not start by the Soviet occupation. It was originally an uprising of radical Muslims against the secular government, which was trying to implement such controversial policies as equal opportunities for woman. Unfortunately, it was aligned with the Soviet Union, which send in troops to help prop up the government. USA started to arm and train the mujahadeen for no other reason than to help the USSR’s enemy. During this conflict large number of small children were orphaned and many were sent to schools run by fanatical Muslims which brought them up to be also fanatical Muslims. These children grew up and became Taliban.
Correct. And I don't think anyone can argue that the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan was an unfortunate, unintended, and unforseen consequence of our actions in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among other contributing factors.
There's still a HUGE (and unreasonable) leap, however, between that fact and the arguement that the US created/supported the Taliban, Bin Laden, etc. And despite all the shady allusions and misleading cites in this thread, I still have yet to see any direct evidence to back up these assertions.
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High on the wind, the Highland drums begin to roll, and something from the past just comes and stares into my soul... --Mark Knopfler
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