-Caveat Lector- from: http://alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_osama.html ---- BIN LADEN COMES HOME TO ROOST His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story By Michael Moran MSNBC NEW YORK, Aug. 24 At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow. BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet. But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 was one of those times. BIN LADEN'S BEGINNINGS Terrorist backer? Bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world. Osama bin Laden's network ... By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar the MAK which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war. What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation. By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan's freedom like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation were Afghan nationals. Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to 'read' than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the 'reliable' partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow. WHAT'S 'INTELLIGENT' ABOUT THIS? Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero. In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan. Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt's Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996. Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. 'It was worth it,' he said. 'Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,' he said. HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this. It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA's Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party's grip on power in Moscow. Even Hatch can't be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its 'mission,' had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director William Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual 'Soviet Military Power' report right up to 1990. Given that context, a decision was made to provide America's potential enemies with the arms, money and most importantly the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower. That decision is coming home to roost. Michael Moran is MSNBC's International Editor Osama bin Laden's American Business Ties WorldNetDaily SEPTEMBER 2, 1998 Terrorism -- fact and fiction When President Clinton announced the missile strikes against terrorist bases in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons plant in Sudan last week, the issues seemed pretty clear cut. Even for those of us who suspected the timing of these attacks had more to do with Clinton's personal scandals than real foreign policy objectives, we had few doubts that bad guys had actually been targeted. Remember what the president said? He claimed he stayed "up till 2:30 in the morning trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift." Right out of Michael Douglas' script in "The American President," Clinton added, "I didn't want some person who was a nobody to me, but who may have a family to feed and a life to live, and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly...." Now let's keep in mind that President Clinton personally chose the bombing site, a medicine factory with a United Nations contract, from among a larger set of targets presented to him by military planners.... Then there's the matter of Osama. We're certainly getting a different picture of this terrorist than we got from the early reports by the Clinton administration. It turns out Osama bin Laden's family is one of the richest of the rich -- worth an estimated $5 billion. It's a pretty well-connected family, too. His brother is a director of the U.S. telecommunications giant Iridium, which is set to launch a revolutionary new global satellite communications system. And guess who has launched Iridium's satellites into space? You guessed it. Clinton's friends in China. And who are the family's partners on Iridium? Clinton's friends at the Loral Corp. and Hughes Electronics. The family also does millions of dollars of business with the U.S. government, having built an Air Force base for us in Saudi Arabia after Osama was blamed for blowing up the Khobar Towers in 1996. So let's get this straight. Osama blows up our facilities, and his family gets the contract for rebuilding them. Do you get the feeling there is more going on here than meets the eye? Then there are the questions concerning the other targets of our cruise missile attacks -- Osama's terrorist bases in Afghanistan. Of course, Osama survived the attacks, having, apparently, been tipped off in advance. Was he really the target? Or were these attacks one more example of what the Clinton administration has become famous for -- symbolism over substance. If the U.S. really wanted Osama, he could have been picked up any number of times in the past on his frequent visits to America, when he has stayed at the finest hotels in New York... There are reports even from Afghanistan that more than terrorists were hit. Normally, we could dismiss accounts that mosques were struck as predictable political propaganda by anti-American extremists. But, with the track record of the Clinton administration insofar as truth is concerned ... just whom are we to believe? 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